Research Scientist, Fauna

About the role

We are seeking a Research Scientist to lead the development of evaluation frameworks and data collection protocols for robotic capabilities. In this role, you will focus on designing how we measure, stress-test, and improve robot behavior across a wide range of real-world tasks. Your work will play a critical role in shaping how policies are validated and how high-quality datasets are generated to accelerate system performance. You will operate at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and human-in-the-loop systems, building the infrastructure and methodologies that connect teleoperation, evaluation, and learning.

This includes developing evaluation policies, defining task structures, and contributing to operator-facing interfaces that enable scalable and reliable data collection. The ideal candidate is highly experimental, systems-oriented, and comfortable working across software, robotics, and data pipelines, with a strong focus on turning ambiguous capability goals into measurable and actionable evaluation systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement evaluation frameworks to measure robot capabilities across structured tasks, edge cases, and real-world scenarios
• Develop task definitions, success criteria, and benchmarking methodologies that enable consistent and reproducible evaluation of policies
• Create and refine data collection protocols that generate high-quality, task-relevant datasets aligned with model development needs
• Build and iterate on teleoperation workflows and operator interfaces to support efficient, reliable, and scalable data collection
• Analyze evaluation results and collected data to identify performance gaps, failure modes, and opportunities for targeted data collection
• Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate evaluation tooling, logging systems, and data pipelines into the broader robotics stack
• Stay current with advances in robotics, evaluation methodologies, and human-in-the-loop learning to continuously improve internal approaches
• Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment
• Mentor junior scientists and engineers

Requirements

• PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of quantitative field research experience
• Experience investigating the feasibility of applying scientific principles and concepts to business problems and products
• Experience analyzing both experimental and observational data sets

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of R, MATLAB, Python or similar scripting language
• Experience with agile development
• Experience building web-based dashboards using common frameworks

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance, and optional supplemental life plans)
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and Mental Health Support
• Medical Advice Line and Flexible Spending Accounts
• Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage
• 401(k) matching
• Paid time off and parental leave
• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs)

Learn more about our benefits at amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

Pay

USA, NY, New York - $157,300.00 - $212,800.00 USD annually