Applied Scientist - Robotics: Learned Manipulation

Amazon; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 143,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage

Paid Time Off

401(k) Plan

Parental Leave Options

Job summary

Amazon Robotics in Seattle is seeking an Applied Scientist to advance learned controllers and manipulation behaviors for production robots in fulfillment centers. You will push the boundaries of robotic manipulation using reinforcement learning and behavior cloning, shaping policies that operate reliably in complex real-world environments.

You will design learning pipelines that move from simulation to real-time execution, evaluate manipulation outcomes under uncertainty, and collaborate across

Qualifications

• PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of science, technology, engineering or related field experience.
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language.
• Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals.
• Experience training reinforcement learning or imitation learning policies for manipulation or robot control problems.
• Strong background in reinforcement learning, including reward design and training at scale in simulation.

Responsibilities

• Develop learned controllers and manipulation behaviors, from research prototyping through deployment on production robots.
• Research, design, and implement motion planning, control, and decision-making algorithms that improve the performance of deployed systems.
• Design and deploy learning pipelines that take policies from simulation training to reliable, real-time execution on physical robots.
• Develop models that predict manipulation outcomes and inform behavior selection under uncertainty.
• Leverage operational data from deployed systems to systematically identify failure modes and drive policy improvements.
• Represent Amazon in academia through publications and scientific presentations.

Skills

Reinforcement learning

Imitation learning

Python

C++

Java

Research publications

Robot control

Education

PhD or MS in a related field

Job description

Amazon Robotics in Seattle is seeking an Applied Scientist to advance learned controllers and manipulation behaviors for production robots in fulfillment centers. You will push the boundaries of robotic manipulation using reinforcement learning and behavior cloning, shaping policies that operate reliably in complex real-world environments.

You will design learning pipelines that move from simulation to real-time execution, evaluate manipulation outcomes under uncertainty, and collaborate across