Applied Scientist: Robotics & Foundation Models

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

RSUs and stock-based compensation

401(k) matching

Job summary

Amazon is seeking an Applied Scientist to develop and improve machine learning systems for robotic perception, reasoning, and action in real-world settings. You will work with open-source and internal models, assess them on representative tasks, and optimize for robustness, safety, and performance.

You will collaborate with research, controls, hardware, and product teams to deploy algorithms on robot embodiments and advance research-to-implementation efforts at scale.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of building models for business applications
• 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 CV, 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 (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
• Build and run capability evaluations/benchmarks to profile performance, generalization, and failure modes
• Contribute to data and training workflow: collection/curation, dataset quality/provenance, reproducible training recipes
• Write clean, maintainable code, contribute to training infrastructure, create tools for model evaluation and testing, and implement APIs
• Stay current with foundation models and robotics; assist in literature reviews and technical reports
• Collaborate with senior scientists/engineers; support integration with robotics hardware; document best practices

Skills

Model building

Experiment design

Publications/patents

Education

PhD / Master + ML practice

Tools

C/C++

Python

Java

Perl

Job description

Amazon is seeking an Applied Scientist to develop and improve machine learning systems for robotic perception, reasoning, and action in real-world settings. You will work with open-source and internal models, assess them on representative tasks, and optimize for robustness, safety, and performance.

You will collaborate with research, controls, hardware, and product teams to deploy algorithms on robot embodiments and advance research-to-implementation efforts at scale.