Applied Scientist — Human-Robot Interaction & Social AI

Amazon Science; New York (NY); On-site; USD 172,000 - 223,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Science is seeking an experienced Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Applied Scientist to advance socially intelligent robot behavior. You will work on verbal and non-verbal conversational systems, social dynamics, memory, and long-term relationship formation between robots and people in real environments.

You will lead projects from idea through deployment, mentor junior engineers, and stay at the forefront of HRI, NLP, and multimodal AI to enable expressive and trustworthy robot interactions.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of building models for business application experience.
• PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience.
• Experience publishing in top-tier venues.

Responsibilities

• Develop interactive systems leveraging LLMs, multimodal inputs/outputs, RLHF or other advanced techniques for fluid, engaging robot behavior.
• Design and implement intelligent conversational systems with turn-taking, grounding, interruption and contextual awareness.
• Integrate sensor streams (gaze, expressions, gesture) to understand social context and produce lifelike interactions.
• Develop memory and personalization systems for long-term user relationships and adaptation over weeks and months.
• Stay updated on HRI, NLP, multimodal AI and cognitive/social science advances to apply cutting-edge techniques.
• Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment.
• Mentor junior scientists and engineers.
• Bridge research initiatives with practical engineering implementations.

Skills

Java

C++

Python

Large language models

Memory and personalization

Social robotics

Publications or patents

Education

PhD or MS with 4+ years in CS/CE/ML

Tools

Unix/Linux

Professional software development

Job description

Amazon Science is seeking an experienced Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Applied Scientist to advance socially intelligent robot behavior. You will work on verbal and non-verbal conversational systems, social dynamics, memory, and long-term relationship formation between robots and people in real environments.

You will lead projects from idea through deployment, mentor junior engineers, and stay at the forefront of HRI, NLP, and multimodal AI to enable expressive and trustworthy robot interactions.