Applied Scientist II - Robotics Simulation, Amazon Robotics R&D

About the role

We are looking for an Applied Scientist to join the Robotics Simulation team at Amazon Robotics. In this hands-on, execution-focused role, you will design, build, and validate the simulation environments and policy training pipelines that enable robots to learn manipulation and mobility skills in simulation and transfer them to real hardware. You will work at the intersection of robotics simulation science and modern Physical AI, collaborating with SDEs, Technical Artists, and partner science teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement GPU-accelerated reinforcement learning and imitation learning environments in NVIDIA Isaac Lab for manipulation and mobility tasks.
• Build and maintain policy training pipelines supporting diverse model architectures (diffusion policies, VLAs, behavior cloning, actor-critic RL) and evaluate trained policies in simulation.
• Characterize and reduce sim-to-real gaps through systematic validation: compare simulated sensor outputs, kinematics, and dynamics against real-world robot data, then implement targeted improvements.
• Implement domain randomization strategies (visual, physics, geometric) to improve policy robustness and transfer to real hardware.
• Develop sim-to-real transfer techniques including system identification, physics parameter calibration, and visual domain adaptation.
• Create robot embodiment validation tests (joint kinematics, actuator response, contact behavior) to ensure digital twins are faithful to real hardware.
• Build data pipelines for recording, replaying, and augmenting demonstration data (from teleoperation or automated trajectory generation) to scale training data volume.
• Contribute to end-effector modeling and contact dynamics tuning, ensuring physically plausible gripper and tool interactions in simulation.
• Author design documents for new simulation science capabilities and contribute to technical reviews.
• Collaborate with partner science teams to understand their model architectures and ensure simulation environments meet their training requirements.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage
• Maternity and Parental Leave Options
• Paid Time Off (PTO)
• 401(k) Plan

About The Team

The Robotics Simulation team is a multidisciplinary organization of SDEs, Applied Scientists, and Technical Artists at Amazon Robotics. We build the simulation infrastructure that powers Physical AI development, from photorealistic synthetic data to GPU-accelerated training environments. Our simulation stack enables robots to be designed, trained, and validated entirely in simulation before physical hardware exists, compressing development timelines and de-risking robotics programs across Amazon.

The team delivers end-to-end simulation stacks for Amazon's robotics programs, including high-fidelity robot digital twins, teleoperation data collection infrastructure, scalable synthetic demonstration generation, policy training and inference pipelines (RL, imitation learning, VLAs), domain randomization for sim-to-real transfer, and model validation in simulation. We partner closely with hardware teams, science organizations, and robotics program leads across Amazon Robotics.