Senior Applied Scientist, Personal Robotics Group

Amazon • Sunnyvale, CA

1d

About The Position

Robots are about to step out of the movies and into our homes. If you're excited
about this robotics revolution, come join Amazon's Personal Robotics Group. As
an Applied Scientist in this org, you'll push the state-of-the-art techniques in
Robotics. You'll drive technical excellence in areas such as perception,
manipulation, sim2real transfer, reinforcement learning and multi-task learning,
designing novel algorithms that bridge the gap between research and real-world
deployment.

In this role, you will integrate hands-on technical expertise with scientific
leadership, ensuring your team delivers robust solutions for dynamic real-world
environments. While staying updated with the latest advancements in robotics
research, you will leverage your experience and expertise to guide the team
towards the most promising direction. Collaborating with a talented group of
software engineers and scientists, you will bring your ideas to fruition.
Deploying robots in home environments requires you to anticipate challenges not
encountered in structured settings like warehouses. Additionally, consumer-grade
sensors and actuators necessitate working around their limitations, requiring
out-of-the-box innovative ideas. As such, you are someone who truly enjoys
thinking about problems using first principles at a holistic and systems level
to address the aforementioned challenges.

The Personal Robotics Group is pioneering intelligent robotic products that
deliver meaningful customer experiences. We're building the next generation of
robotic systems that will redefine how customers interact with technology. This
is a unique opportunity to shape the future of personal robotics working with
world-class teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotic
manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction.

Join us if you’re passionate about creating the future of personal robotics,
solving complex challenges at the intersection of hardware and software, and
seeing your innovation deliver transformative customer experiences.

Requirements

• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning
• Hands-on experience with RL policy training and deployment for robotics

Nice To Haves

• PhD in engineering, technology, computer science, machine learning, robotics, operations research, statistics, mathematics or equivalent quantitative field
• Have publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
• Experience with training and deploying machine learning systems to solve large-scale optimizations, or experience with software development lifecycle
• Hand-on experience of deploying Deep Learning models on robots
• Experience in developing Vision Language Action (VLA) models and/or Reinforcement learning for robot manipulation

Responsibilities

• Lead technical initiatives in areas such as robotics foundation models, reinforcement learning and manipulation - - Design experiments to identify the limitations of current state-of-the-art models and developing new models or techniques that can surpass these models
• Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish
• Mentor fellow scientists while maintaining strong individual technical contributions
• Collaborate with engineering teams to optimize and scale models for real-world applications
• Influence technical decisions and implementation strategies within your area of focus
• Experienced in communicating complex technical work to a non-technical audience
• The ability to work with minimal guidance, be proactive and to handle ambiguity and the challenge of quickly evolving goals

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree