Applied Scientist: ML-Driven Robotic Manipulation

Amazon; North Reading (MA); On-site; USD 143,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) matching

Paid time off

Job summary

Amazon Robotics is seeking an Applied Scientist to develop manipulation controllers for robotic systems operating in contact-rich, uncertain environments. You will design force-aware control strategies and augment them with data-driven learning to achieve robust manipulation that generalizes across objects and tasks.

You will collaborate with perception, ML, planning, controls, and software teams to validate policies in simulation and on hardware, then transition successful approaches into

Qualifications

• PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of science, technology, engineering or related field experience.
• Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals.
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language.
• Experience designing, running, and analyzing experiments in simulation and on real robotic hardware.

Responsibilities

• Research, design, implement, and evaluate machine learning–based manipulation policies for contact-rich tasks, integrating learning with feedback control, estimation, and motion planning.
• Develop learning frameworks that leverage simulation, real-world data, and hybrid physics- and data-driven models to enable robust agency interaction, grasping, insertion, and object handling.
• Design and execute experiments in simulation and on hardware to train, validate, and stress-test learned manipulation policies under real-world variability and uncertainty.
• Collaborate with software engineering teams to deliver scalable, real-time, and maintainable implementations of learning-based manipulation algorithms in production robotic systems.
• Partner with cross-functional teams across perception, hardware, systems engineering, science, and operations to transition learned policies from research prototypes to reliable, production-ready capabilities across Amazon Robotics platforms.

Skills

Java

C++

Python

Simulation tools

Education

PhD or Master’s degree

Tools

Patents/publications

Job description

Amazon Robotics is seeking an Applied Scientist to develop manipulation controllers for robotic systems operating in contact-rich, uncertain environments. You will design force-aware control strategies and augment them with data-driven learning to achieve robust manipulation that generalizes across objects and tasks.

You will collaborate with perception, ML, planning, controls, and software teams to validate policies in simulation and on hardware, then transition successful approaches into