There's a trade-off here: You have to do things that have immediate value to the company (which, at Amazon, corresponds exactly to things that have value to your customers), but you pretty much have the power of the entire internet to do this (AWS). Not to mention more data than most researchers could ever dream of. It's not just monetary.

Since research at Amazon is new, I have no idea how well they're going to handle giving back to the community long-term. But I'm interning with a verification group there and the gist seems to be that if the group wants to give back and there's at least one person who's influential enough to get what they ask for, the group will give back.

I think it's actually problematic that research and industry concerns don't correspond more often. Yeah, it's not our job to be engineers and ship products, but it seems like there are important questions we ought to be answering as researchers that we consider industry ground, but that engineers don't actually have the background to solve. Some of these are totally arbitrary, chosen by the community, deemed "uninteresting" if you want to get published anywhere decent, even though there's plenty of interesting work left.