Senior Applied Scientist, Fauna Robotics

About the role

As an Applied Scientist in Amazon's Fauna Robotics, you'll push the state-of-the-art techniques in robotics, driving technical excellence in areas such as perception, manipulation, sim2real transfer, reinforcement learning, and multi-task learning. You will design novel algorithms that bridge the gap between research and real-world deployment, integrating hands-on technical expertise with scientific leadership to deliver 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, demanding innovative, first-principles thinking at a holistic and systems level.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical initiatives in 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 robot capabilities
• 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
• Train ML models for deployment in simulation and real-world robots, and document their post-deployment limitations
• Drive technical discussions with your team and key stakeholders to develop innovative solutions
• Guide fellow scientists in solving complex technical challenges, from sim2real transfer to training RL policies

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 of robotics won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible.

We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that 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.

Requirements

• 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

Skills

• Ability to communicate complex technical work to a non-technical audience
• Ability to work with minimal guidance, be proactive, and handle ambiguity and evolving goals

Pay

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

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

Benefits

• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D, with options for 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
• Parental leave
• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs)