Applied Scientist, FAR (Frontier AI & Robotics)

Amazon; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Join an innovative team at the forefront of robotics and AI, where you'll develop groundbreaking foundation models that empower robots to perceive and interact with their environments. As an Applied Scientist, you'll engage in independent research and collaborate with top-tier engineers to create robust algorithms that bridge the gap between research and real-world applications. With access to extensive computational resources, you'll tackle ambitious challenges in multi-modal robotic models and contribute to shaping the future of robotics technology. This role offers a unique opportunity to transform theoretical insights into practical solutions, making a significant impact in a dynamic and inclusive workplace.

Qualifications

• PhD in computer science or related field required.
• Strong programming skills in Python and deep learning model implementation.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement novel deep learning architectures for robotics.
• Lead technical projects from conception to deployment.

Skills

Deep Learning

Programming (Java, C++, Python)

Problem Solving

Robotics

Machine Learning

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related fields

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Unix/Linux

Job description

Job ID: 2850576 | Amazon.com Services LLC

Join the next revolution in robotics at Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team. As an Applied Scientist, you'll be at the forefront of developing breakthrough foundation models that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways. You'll drive independent research initiatives in areas such as perception, manipulation, science understanding, sim2real transfer, multi-modal foundation models, and multi-task learning, designing novel algorithms that bridge the gap between research and real-world deployment at Amazon scale.
In this role, you'll balance innovative technical exploration with practical implementation, collaborating with platform teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly in dynamic real-world environments. You'll have access to Amazon's vast computational resources, enabling you to tackle ambitious problems in areas like very large multi-modal robotic foundation models and efficient, promptable model architectures that can scale across diverse robotic applications.

Key job responsibilities

1. Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish
2. Drive independent research initiatives in robotics foundation models, focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception and manipulation, for example open-vocabulary panoptic scene understanding, scaling up multi-modal LLMs, sim2real/real2sim techniques, end-to-end vision-language-action models, efficient model inference, video tokenization
3. Lead technical projects from conceptualization through deployment, ensuring robust performance in production environments
4. Collaborate with platform teams to optimize and scale models for real-world applications
5. Contribute to the team's technical strategy and help shape our approach to next-generation robotics challenges

A day in the life

1. Design and implement novel foundation model architectures, leveraging our extensive compute infrastructure to train and evaluate at scale
2. Collaborate with our world-class research team to solve complex technical challenges
3. Lead technical initiatives from conception to deployment, working closely with robotics engineers to integrate your solutions into production systems
4. Participate in technical discussions and brainstorming sessions with team leaders and fellow scientists
5. Leverage our massive compute cluster and extensive robotics infrastructure to rapidly prototype and validate new ideas
6. Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that can handle the complexities of real-world robotics applications

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

1. PhD in computer science, machine learning, engineering, or related fields
2. Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
3. Publication record at top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, RSS, CoRL)
4. Experience developing and implementing deep learning models
5. Strong programming skills in Python and PyTorch/JAX
6. Track record of solving complex technical problems

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

1. Experience using Unix/Linux
2. First-author publications at major ML/robotics conferences
3. Experience with foundation models or large language models
4. Background in computer vision, robotics, or related fields
5. Experience with sim2real transfer or multi-task learning
6. Familiarity with distributed training systems
7. Track record of deploying ML models in production environments
8. Experience with large-scale machine learning systems

Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status.