Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Industrial Robotics

Key job responsibilities

• Collaborate with simulation and robotics experts to translate physical modeling needs into robust, scalable, and maintainable simulation solutions.
• Design and implement high-performance simulation modeling and tools for rigid and deformable body simulation.
• Identify and optimize performance bottlenecks in simulation pipelines to support real-time and batch simulation workflows.
• Help build validation and unit testing pipelines to ensure correctness and physical fidelity of simulation results.
• Identify potential sources of sim-to-real gaps and propose modeling and numerical approximations to reduce them.
• Stay current with the latest advances in numerical methods, parallel computing, and GPU architectures, and incorporate them into our tools.

Basic Qualifications

• PhD, or PhD and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
• Strong programming skills in modern Python and/or C++ and experience with GPU programming (CUDA, Warp, or similar).
• Experience with robotics simulation environments such as MuJoCo, Newton, Drake and/or Isaac Lab.
• Expertise in one or more of the following: Solid foundation in numerical methods for multibody dynamics, frictional contact, Finite Element Method (FEM), Material Point Method (MPM) or other approaches for physics-based simulation.
• Experience implementing scientific or simulation software in a collaborative, production-quality codebase.
• Proficiency in linear algebra, differential equations, and numerical analysis.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• Experience working effectively across cross-functional teams and partnering well with people at all levels within an organization
• PhD in simulation
• Experience in one or more of the following: bimanual manipulation, imitation learning for dexterous manipulation, reinforcement learning for locomotion, teleoperation systems for data collection