CareerFair - Day-to-day as an Applied Scientist at Amazon

Eugene Yan · 6 years ago · 35

Eugene Yan, an Applied Scientist at Amazon, describes his daily work building machine learning systems for book recommendations and discovery features, involving stand-ups, data exploration, coding, writing, paper reading, and meetings. His typical day allocates time across multiple activities including literature research, offline experiments, A/B testing, and documentation, with occasional high-severity incidents or legacy system migrations disrupting normal workflow. Yan emphasizes that communication skills are critical for data scientist effectiveness, and that working with data and machine learning at scale across millions of customers provides the most satisfaction in the role.