Applied Science Manager, Safe Autonomy, SAF Lab

About the role

We are seeking an Applied Science Manager to join the SAF Lab. In this role, you will lead a team of world-class applied scientists, engineers, post-docs and interns developing the next generation of safe autonomy on highly dynamic robotic systems. You will drive technical vision, research strategy, and ensure your team's innovations translate into production systems that operate at Amazon scale. You will interface with top academic researchers at the forefront of safe autonomy, and interdisciplinary teams across Amazon working on autonomous mobile robots, mobile manipulators, and dynamically stable robots. You will bridge academic research with real-world deployable safety layers that enable robots to safely operate around humans.

Responsibilities

• Manage a team of scientists and engineers developing a universal safety layer for robotic systems, with a focus on the next generation of robots
• Work with leadership to design and execute multi-year research roadmaps for the development of safe autonomy that spans all types of current and emerging robotic platforms
• Lead Scientists, Engineers, post-docs and interns to realize research and development goals and provide evidence of these results in a variety of formats
• Drive integration of control barrier functions with planning, perception and learning while maintaining guarantees of safe high-performance robot behavior
• Collaborate with product teams and science leaders to set a science roadmap (with eventual impact on real robots)
• Publish research findings at top-tier conferences and contribute to the broader robotics community
• Build relationships with academic and industry partners to stay at the forefront of safe autonomy

Qualifications

• PhD in Engineering, Technology, Science, Operations Research, Robotics, Mathematics or related fields
• Experience in demonstrating research to complex hardware platforms or product development in robotics, autonomous systems, or related fields
• Experience managing, developing and leading teams
• Track record of research that has the potential to translate to production systems
• Track record of publications in top-tier conferences in robotics and control (RSS, ICRA,IROS, CoRL, NeurIPS, ICML, TRO, CDC, ACC, RAL, CSL) or patents in robotics and autonomy
• Deep expertise and technical understanding of robotics concepts for sensing, perception, planning, and control
• Deep understanding of the formal foundations and experimental deployment of control barrier functions and safety filters on highly dynamic robots of different morphologies
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills and comfort working at the boundary between research and commercial robotics
• Experience coordinating teams and stakeholders across geographies
• Experience deploying software on diverse robot embodiments