About the job
Join the next revolution in robotics at Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team, where you'll work alongside world-renowned AI pioneers to push the boundaries of what's possible in robotic intelligence. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you'll spearhead the development of breakthrough foundation models and full-stack robotics systems that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways. You'll drive technical excellence in areas such as perception, manipulation, science understanding, locomotion, manipulation, sim2real transfer, multi-modal foundation models and multi-task robot learning, designing novel frameworks that bridge the gap between state-of-the-art research and real-world deployment at Amazon scale.
Responsibilities
- Lead technical initiatives across the robotics stack, driving breakthrough approaches through hands-on research and development in areas including robotics foundation models, focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation, for example open-vocabulary panoptic scene understanding, scaling up multi-modal LLMs, sim2real/real2sim techniques, end-to-end vision-language-action models, efficient model inference, video tokenization
- Guide technical direction for full-stack robotics projects from conceptualization through deployment, taking a system-level approach that integrates hardware considerations with algorithmic development, ensuring robust performance in production environments
- Mentor fellow scientists while maintaining strong individual technical contributions
- Collaborate with platform and hardware teams to ensure seamless integration across the entire robotics stack
- Influence technical decisions and implementation strategies within your area of focus
Qualifications
Minimum
- PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
- 3+ years of industry or academic research experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience applying theoretical models in an applied environment
- Strong publication record at major or top-tier Robotics/ML/AI conferences
- Demonstrated track record of leading technical projects
- Experience mentoring junior scientists/engineers
- Demonstrated expertise in deep learning and robotics system development
Preferred
- History of impactful first-author publications at major conferences
- Experience leading research initiatives in full-stack robotics or foundation models
- Track record of successful production robotics deployments
- Experience with large-scale distributed systems
- History of technical leadership and team mentorship
- Experience bridging research with practical engineering implementation in robotics systems
- Extensive programming skills in Python and PyTorch/JAX