Member of Technical Staff - Hardware Science, Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR)

About the role

The Amazon’s Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR) team is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to drive foundational research and build intelligent robotic systems from the ground up. This role involves operating at the intersection of innovative AI research and real-world robotics, conducting original research, publishing, and deploying innovations into production systems at Amazon scale.

Responsibilities

• Drive independent research initiatives across the full robotics stack, including robot co-design, manipulation mechanisms, innovative actuation and motor control 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 hardware deployment, taking a system-level approach that integrates actuator dynamics, sensor feedback (force/torque, IMUs, encoders), and electromechanical constraints with algorithmic development.
• Develop and optimize control algorithms and sensing pipelines for physical robotic hardware, including motor characterization, actuator performance tuning, and robust sensor integration in production environments.
• Collaborate with hardware, mechanical, and electrical engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of learned models across the robotics stack—from embedded compute and communication buses to actuator-level control.
• Contribute to the team's technical strategy and help shape our approach to next-generation hardware-aware robotics challenges, including hardware-in-the-loop validation and prototype-to-deployment transitions.

Qualifications

• PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience.
• Experience programming languages such as C/C++, Python, Java or Perl.
• 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.
• Prior industry or academic research experience and demonstrated expertise in full-stack robotics or foundation models or large-scale robotics system development.
• Extensive programming skills in Python and PyTorch/JAX.
• History of impactful first-author publications at major or top-tier Robotics/ML/AI conferences.
• Hands-on experience bridging research with practical engineering implementation in robotics systems and track record of successful production robotics deployments.
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems.