Applied Scientist, Robotics Foundation Models

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) matching

Paid time off

Parental leave

RSUs

Job summary

Amazon's Industrial Robotics Group seeks an Applied Scientist to advance robotics foundation models for real-world automation in Sunnyvale, CA. You will develop ML systems enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act using open-source and internal models, evaluating them on representative tasks and adapting them for robustness and safety.

You will collaborate with research, controls, hardware, and product teams, maintain scalable training workflows, and document results and methodologies for

Qualifications

• 2+ years building models for business applications.
• Knowledge of programming languages such as C/C++, Python, Java or Perl.
• PhD, or Master’s + 4+ years building ML models/algorithms in applied settings.
• 2+ years hands-on experience in deep learning with strength in at least one: computer vision, multimodal models, imitation learning / RL for robotics, or human-robot interaction.
• Ability to design rigorous experiments, analyze results, and iterate quickly with reproducible baselines.
• Demonstrated technical contributions (e.g., publications, patents, open-source, or impactful internal systems)

Responsibilities

• Leverage state-of-the art models for targeted tasks, environments, and robot embodiments through fine-tuning and optimization.
• Execute rapid, rigorous experimentation with reproducible results and solid engineering practices, closing the gap between sim and real environments.
• Build and run capability evaluations/benchmarks to clearly profile performance, generalization, and failure modes.
• Contribute to the data and training workflow: collection/curation, dataset quality/provenance, and repeatable training recipes.
• Write clean, maintainable, well commented and documented code, contribute to training infrastructure, create tools for model evaluation and testing, and implement necessary APIs
• Stay current with latest developments in foundation models and robotics, assist in literature reviews and research documentation, prepare technical reports and presentations, and contribute to research discussions and brainstorming sessions.
• Work closely with senior scientists, engineers, and leaders across multiple teams, participate in knowledge sharing, support integration efforts with robotics hardware teams, and help document best practices and methodologies.

Skills

C/C++

Python

Java or Perl

Deep learning

Computer vision

Multimodal models

Imitation learning / RL

Human-robot interaction

Experiment design

Publications / Open-source

Education

PhD or MSc + 4+ years experience

Tools

Unix/Linux

Job description

Amazon's Industrial Robotics Group seeks an Applied Scientist to advance robotics foundation models for real-world automation in Sunnyvale, CA. You will develop ML systems enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act using open-source and internal models, evaluating them on representative tasks and adapting them for robustness and safety.

You will collaborate with research, controls, hardware, and product teams, maintain scalable training workflows, and document results and methodologies for