Applied Scientist, Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR)

Job ID: 3141238 | Amazon.com Services LLC

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'll drive independent research initiatives in areas such as locomotion, manipulation, sim2real transfer, multi‑modal 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'll balance innovative technical exploration with practical implementation, collaborating with platform teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly in dynamic real‑world environments. You'll have access to Amazon's vast computational resources, enabling you to tackle ambitious problems in areas like very large multi‑modal robotic foundation models and efficient, promptable model architectures that can scale across diverse robotic applications.

Key job responsibilities

• Drive independent research initiatives across the robotics stack, including robot co‑design, dexterous manipulation mechanisms, innovative actuation strategies, state estimation, low‑level control, system identification, reinforcement learning, and sim‑to‑real transfer, as well as foundation models for perception and manipulation

• Lead full‑stack robotics projects from conceptualization through deployment, taking a system‑level approach that integrates hardware considerations with algorithmic development

• Develop and optimize control algorithms and sensing pipelines that enable robust performance in production environments

• Collaborate with platform and hardware teams to ensure seamless integration across the entire robotics stack

• 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 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 your 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 groundbreaking foundation models and end‑to‑end learned systems. We tackle 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.

What sets us apart

We leverage Amazon's massive computational infrastructure and rich real‑world datasets to train and deploy state‑of‑the‑art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence – from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real‑world scenarios. We're building systems that don't just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon's global operations.

Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world‑class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.

Basic Qualifications

• PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of ME, EE, CS, CE, or related field experience

• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language

• Experience with hardware design, low‑level control, state estimation, system identification, or complex electrical systems

• Experience in patents or publications at top‑tier peer‑reviewed conferences or journals

• Experience applying theoretical models in an applied environment

• 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 conferences (RSS, CoRL, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ICRA, IROS)

• Background in computer vision, robotics, or related fields

• Experience with sim‑to‑real transfer or multi‑task learning

• Familiarity with distributed training systems

• Track record of deploying ML models in production environments

• Experience with large‑