Senior Applied Scientist, Fauna Robotics

About the role

Robots are about to step out of the movies and into our homes. As an Applied Scientist in Amazon's Fauna Robotics, you'll push the state-of-the-art techniques in Robotics. You'll drive technical excellence in areas such as perception, manipulation, sim2real transfer, reinforcement learning, and multi-task learning, designing novel algorithms that bridge the gap between research and real-world deployment.

In this role, you will integrate hands-on technical expertise with scientific leadership, ensuring your team delivers robust solutions for dynamic real-world environments. Deploying robots in home environments requires anticipating challenges not encountered in structured settings like warehouses. Consumer-grade sensors and actuators necessitate working around their limitations, requiring innovative, first-principles thinking at a holistic and systems level.

A day in the life includes training ML models for deployment in simulation and real-world robots, identifying and documenting their limitations post-deployment, driving technical discussions with stakeholders, guiding fellow scientists in solving complex challenges, and mentoring team members while maintaining significant hands-on contributions.

About the team

Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is to make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe the future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible.

We develop tightly integrated hardware and software systems to make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience—building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful.

At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical initiatives in areas such as robotics foundation models, reinforcement learning, and manipulation
• Design experiments to identify limitations of current state-of-the-art models and develop new models or techniques to surpass them
• Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish
• Mentor fellow scientists while maintaining strong individual technical contributions
• Collaborate with engineering teams to optimize and scale models for real-world applications
• Influence technical decisions and implementation strategies within your area of focus
• Communicate complex technical work to a non-technical audience

Qualifications

• 3+ years of building machine learning models for business applications
• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
• Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning
• Strong publication record at major Robotics/CV conferences (e.g., RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV)
• Experience programming in Python, C++, or related language

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience deploying Deep Learning models on robots
• Experience developing Vision Language Action (VLA) models and/or Reinforcement Learning for robot manipulation

Pay

USA, CA, Sunnyvale - $192,200.00 - $260,000.00 USD annually

USA, WA, Bellevue - $167,100.00 - $226,100.00 USD annually

Benefits

Amazon offers comprehensive benefits including:

• 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
• 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.