Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Robotics - Vulcan

Description

Our team in Amazon Robotics builds robotic systems that perform contact-rich manipulation tasks safely and reliably in complex, unstructured environments — at Amazon scale. Our scientists and engineers push the boundaries of robotic manipulation to handle enormous object diversity, bringing deep expertise across planning, control, perception, and machine learning. We learn from real-world data at a scale that few teams in robotics can access.

Key job responsibilities

• Drive the development of learned controllers and manipulation behaviors, from research prototyping through deployment on production robots.
• Research, design, and implement motion planning, control, and decision-making algorithms that improve the performance of deployed systems.
• Design and deploy learning pipelines that take policies from simulation training to reliable, real-time execution on physical robots.
• Develop models that predict manipulation outcomes and inform behavior selection under uncertainty.
• Own the development of scalable, real-time implementations — writing production-quality code and setting engineering standards for the team.
• Leverage operational data from deployed systems to systematically identify failure modes and drive policy improvements.
• Mentor junior scientists and engineers, raising the bar for applied science rigor and engineering quality.
• Represent Amazon in academia through publications and scientific presentations.

A day in the life

Amazon offers a full range of benefits for you and eligible family members, including domestic partners. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include:

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

Basic Qualifications

• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• 4+ years of robotics work cells and control systems experience
• 3+ years of building and deploying machine learning models for robotics applications
• Track record of training reinforcement learning or imitation learning policies in simulation and successfully transferring them to physical robotic systems

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with sim-to-real transfer at scale (domain randomization, system identification, etc.)
• Experience deploying learned policies in production environments with uptime and reliability requirements
• Experience designing reward functions and training curricula for reinforcement learning on robotic systems
• Publishations in top robotics or machine learning venues (RSS, CoRL, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICML, etc.)