Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Robotics - Vulcan
About The Position
Our team in Amazon Robotics builds robotic systems that perform contact-rich manipulation tasks safely and reliably in complex, unstructured environments — at Amazon scale. Our scientists and engineers push the boundaries of robotic manipulation to handle enormous object diversity, bringing deep expertise across planning, control, perception, and machine learning. We learn from real-world data at a scale that few teams in robotics can access. We are seeking an experienced Senior Applied Scientist to join our Motion Behaviors team. You will drive the development of learned controllers and manipulation behaviors, applying techniques like reinforcement learning and behavior cloning to robots operating in Amazon fulfillment centers. These problems remain unsolved at scale: our robots must improve continuously in environments where simulation alone is insufficient. You will make principled decisions about when learned approaches should replace engineered solutions, and how to select behaviors based on estimated risk. You will collaborate across disciplines and leverage rich operational data to continuously improve system performance.
Requirements
- PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- 4+ years of robotics work cells and control systems experience
- 3+ years of building and deploying machine learning models for robotics applications
- Track record of training reinforcement learning or imitation learning policies in simulation and successfully transferring them to physical robotic systems
Nice To Haves
- Experience with sim-to-real transfer at scale (domain randomization, system identification, etc.)
- Experience deploying learned policies in production environments with uptime and reliability requirements
- Experience designing reward functions and training curricula for reinforcement learning on robotic systems
- Publications in top robotics or machine learning venues (RSS, CoRL, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICML, etc.)
Responsibilities
- Drive the development of learned controllers and manipulation behaviors, from research prototyping through deployment on production robots.
- Research, design, and implement motion planning, control, and decision-making algorithms that improve the performance of deployed systems.
- Design and deploy learning pipelines that take policies from simulation training to reliable, real-time execution on physical robots.
- Develop models that predict manipulation outcomes and inform behavior selection under uncertainty.
- Own the development of scalable, real-time implementations — writing production-quality code and setting engineering standards for the team.
- Leverage operational data from deployed systems to systematically identify failure modes and drive policy improvements.
- Mentor junior scientists and engineers, raising the bar for applied science rigor and engineering quality.
- Represent Amazon in academia through publications and scientific presentations.
Benefits
- Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage
- Maternity and Parental Leave Options
- Paid Time Off (PTO)
- 401(k) Plan
- sign-on payments
- restricted stock units (RSUs)
- health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage)
- 401(k) matching
- paid time off
- parental leave
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
