Applied Scientist: Robot Navigation & Autonomy

Amazon Science; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 172,000 - 222,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

RSU/Equity

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Amazon is seeking a Scientist in Robot Navigation to architect and deploy intelligent, safe, scalable navigation systems for real-world robotic platforms. You will blend learning-based planning with principled control and guide research to production-grade deployment across dynamic environments.

You will lead perception, motion planning, and sensor fusion efforts, collaborating with cross‑functional teams to ship robust robotics solutions and publish advancements at top venues.

Qualifications

• PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Controls, or a related field.
• 2+ years of experience in robot navigation, motion planning, or autonomous systems.
• Strong experience with Model Predictive Control (MPC) and optimization-based planning (PyTorch, JAX, or equivalent).
• Proven track record of translating research into deployed systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy perception algorithms for robotics systems, including object detection, segmentation, tracking, depth estimation, and scene understanding.
• Lead research initiatives in computer vision, sensor fusion and 3D perception.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams including robotics engineers, software engineers, and product managers to define and deliver perception capabilities.
• Drive end‑to‑end ownership of ML models — from data collection and labeling strategy to training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Mentor junior scientists and engineers; contribute to a culture of technical excellence.
• Define and track key metrics to measure perception system performance in real‑world environments.
• Publish research findings in top‑tier venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICRA, NeurIPS, etc.) and contribute to patents.

Skills

Java

C++

Python

Imitation learning

Reinforcement learning

Neural motion planning

MPC

Deployment to production

Education

PhD in Robotics or related field

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

Amazon is seeking a Scientist in Robot Navigation to architect and deploy intelligent, safe, scalable navigation systems for real-world robotic platforms. You will blend learning-based planning with principled control and guide research to production-grade deployment across dynamic environments.

You will lead perception, motion planning, and sensor fusion efforts, collaborating with cross‑functional teams to ship robust robotics solutions and publish advancements at top venues.