Dr. Kim Houchens is the Director of Technical Product Development for AWS Industry Products for Manufacturing, and leads the Research Science team. Kim is passionate about Amazon culture and serves as an executive Bar Raiser (a unique part of Amazon's hiring process), and she specializes in creating automated mechanisms to eliminate waste in manufacturing processes.

Kim has been 7 years with Amazon Operations in Advanced Tech – Robotics, where she was a Sr. Principal, and the Director of the Customer Packaging Experience team, reinventing packaging and fulfillment processes for the e-commerce marketplace. Her team developed machine learning engines to reduce wasteful packaging, created more compact packaging to reduce air shipped, and drove advances in material science to replace plastics with novel recyclable material. She led innovations that scaled across +12B shipments/year, driving a 38% reduction in the weight of packaging delivering sustainability wins for customers.

Prior to joining Amazon, Kim was the Senior Director of Innovations – ML and Enterprise Analytics for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., creating innovation with data sciences to drive change through fulfillment software systems. Kim has also lead R&D and manufacturing optimization for packaging, textiles and films, military, medical, and aerospace products.

Kim holds a B.A., Assoc, M.S. and Ph.D. in product development, material science, and industrial manufacturing technologies.