Applied Scientist, FAR (Frontier AI & Robotics)

Job ID: | Amazon.com Services LLC

Overview

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 an Applied Scientist, you'll be at the forefront of developing breakthrough foundation models that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways.

You will drive independent research initiatives in areas such as perception, manipulation, science understanding, locomotion, 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.

In this role you balance innovative technical exploration with practical implementation, collaborating with platform teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly in dynamic real‑world environments.

Key Job Responsibilities

• Drive independent research initiatives across the robotics stack, focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception and manipulation such as open‑vocabulary panoptic scene understanding, scaling up multi‑modal LLMs, sim2real/real2sim techniques, end‑to‑end vision‑language‑action models, efficient model inference, and video tokenization.
• Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish.
• Lead full‑stack robotics projects from conceptualization through deployment, integrating hardware considerations with algorithmic development to ensure robust performance in production environments.
• Collaborate with platform and hardware teams for seamless integration across the robotics stack, optimizing and scaling models for real‑world applications.
• Contribute to the team's technical strategy and help shape our approach to next‑generation robotics challenges.

A Day in the Life

• Design and implement novel foundation model architectures and innovative systems and algorithms, leveraging our extensive infrastructure to prototype and evaluate at scale.
• Collaborate with our world‑class research team to solve complex technical challenges.
• Lead technical initiatives from conception to deployment, working closely with robotics engineers to integrate solutions into production systems.
• Participate in technical discussions and brainstorming sessions with team leaders and fellow scientists.
• Leverage our massive compute cluster and extensive robotics infrastructure to rapidly prototype and validate new ideas.
• Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that can handle the complexities of real‑world robotics applications.

About the Team

At Frontier AI & Robotics, we're not just advancing robotics – we're reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through innovative foundation models and end‑to‑end learned systems, tackling some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real‑world scenarios.

Basic Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s degree and 4+ years of experience in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning or a related field.
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or a related language.
• Experience in patents or publications at top‑tier peer‑reviewed conferences or journals.
• Experience applying theoretical models in an applied environment.
• Experience building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application.
• Experience developing and implementing deep learning models.
• Track record of solving complex technical problems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience using Unix/Linux.
• First‑author publications at major or top‑tier ML/Robotics/AI conferences.
• Experience with foundation models or large language models.
• Background in robotics, computer vision, or related fields.
• Experience with sim2real transfer or multi‑task learning.
• Familiarity with distributed training systems.
• Track record of deploying ML models in production environments.
• Experience with large‑scale robotic systems.
• Extensive programming skills in Python and PyTorch/JAX.

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Benefits & Compensation

The base salary range for this position is 171,600.00 – 222,200.00 USD annually. Your Amazon package will include sign‑on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and optional supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at

Location

USA, CA, San Francisco

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