Senior Applied Scientist, Fauna Robotics

Robots are about to step out of the movies and into our homes. If you're excited about this robotics revolution, come join Amazon's Fauna Robotics. As an Applied Scientist, 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'll 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.

About the role

In this role, you will lead technical initiatives while collaborating with a talented group of software engineers and scientists to bring your ideas to fruition. Deploying robots in home environments requires anticipating challenges not encountered in structured settings like warehouses, and working around the limitations of consumer-grade sensors and actuators demands innovative, first-principles thinking. You’ll enjoy tackling problems holistically and at a systems level to address these challenges.

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 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
• 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 won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible, so we’re developing 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.

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

Skills

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

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)