Applied Scientist: Foundation Models for Industrial Robotics

Amazon; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 172,000 - 222,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

RSUs

401(k) matching

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Amazon is seeking an Applied Scientist in its Industrial Robotics Group to develop and improve machine learning systems enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act in real‑world environments. You will work with open source and internal models, refine them for robustness and safety, and collaborate with research, controls, hardware, and product teams to deploy on robot embodiments.

You will contribute to data workflows, implement APIs, and stay current with advances in foundation models and

Qualifications

• PhD or MS degree with 4+ years of ML model building in applied settings.
• 2+ years building models for business applications.
• 2+ years hands-on experience in deep learning with CV/multimodal/RL for robotics or related fields.
• Experience using Unix/Linux and professional software development.
• Ability to design rigorous experiments and reproducible baselines.
• Demonstrated technical contributions (publications, patents, or open-source).

Responsibilities

• Leverage state-of-the-art models for targeted robot tasks through fine-tuning and optimization.
• Execute rapid, rigorous experiments with reproducible results bridging simulation and real environments.
• Build and run capability evaluations/benchmarks to profile performance and failure modes.
• Contribute to data collection, curation, and training workflows and recipes.
• Write clean, maintainable, well-documented code and APIs; contribute to training infrastructure.
• Stay current with foundation models and robotics research; document methods and findings.
• Collaborate with senior scientists, engineers, and hardware teams across multiple groups.

Skills

ML model building

Deep learning

Unix/Linux

Software development

Experiment design

Publications/patents

Education

PhD or MS+4 years ML

Tools

Python

C/C++

Java

Perl

Job description

Amazon is seeking an Applied Scientist in its Industrial Robotics Group to develop and improve machine learning systems enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act in real‑world environments. You will work with open source and internal models, refine them for robustness and safety, and collaborate with research, controls, hardware, and product teams to deploy on robot embodiments.

You will contribute to data workflows, implement APIs, and stay current with advances in foundation models and