About the job
We are seeking an Applied Science Manager to lead a new business unit on the GameLift team focused on creating AI and ML-based applications for the gaming industry. This leader will own the technical vision, scientific rigor, and end-to-end delivery of applied science initiatives that solve complex problems in machine learning, data science, and live-service gaming at scale. The ideal candidate operates at the frontier of AI research and deployment, translating ambiguous business opportunities into production-grade ML systems that generate measurable customer and commercial impact.
Responsibilities
Define and execute the technical roadmap for applied science initiatives, balancing frontier research with production delivery requirements and customer timelines
Lead rigorous model development processes including algorithm selection, offline evaluation, A/B testing design, and statistical significance assessment, ensuring every production decision is grounded in scientific evidence rather than intuition
Architect scalable, reusable ML platforms and inference systems designed to serve multiple products without proportional increases in staffing or rebuild cycles, enabling the team to move fast across a growing portfolio
Manage and develop a team of applied scientists and ML engineers, providing technical mentorship, career growth opportunities, and performance management while maintaining a high hiring bar
Drive end-to-end AI deployment from research prototyping through production inference, owning latency, availability, and cost targets alongside model quality metrics
Establish and enforce scientific standards across all team projects, including peer review mechanisms, documentation requirements, and reproducibility practices that ensure technical decisions withstand scrutiny
Qualifications
Minimum
3+ years of scientists or machine learning engineers management experience
Knowledge of ML, NLP, Information Retrieval and Analytics
Knowledge of machine learning approaches and algorithms
Experience building complex highly-scalable systems that involve predictive models or applications of machine learning
Experience communicating with users, other technical teams, and management to collect requirements, describe software product features, and technical designs
Experience in building machine learning models for business application
Preferred
Experience building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application
Experience building complex software systems, especially involving deep learning, machine learning and computer vision, that have been successfully delivered to customers