HRI Applied Scientist: Social & Conversational Robots

Amazon Inc.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 249,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) matching

Paid time off

Parental leave

RSUs

Job summary

Amazon is seeking an Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Applied Scientist to develop expressive, socially intelligent robot interactions. The role focuses on verbal and non-verbal conversational systems, social dynamics, memory, and long-term human-robot relationships.

Responsibilities include leading projects from conception to deployment, mentoring junior scientists, and bridging research with practical engineering for robotics and consumer AI products. Strong publication record required.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s degree with 6+ years of applied research experience.
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language.
• Strong publication record at major HRI/ML/AI/HCI conferences.

Responsibilities

• Develop interactive systems that leverage LLMs, multimodal inputs/outputs, RL from human feedback, or other advanced techniques to achieve fluid social robot behavior.
• Design and implement intelligent conversational systems with turn-taking and grounding from robot context.
• Integrate perceptual sensor streams to understand social context and produce lifelike interactions.
• Develop memory and personalization systems for long-term relationships with users and environments.
• Stay updated on HRI, NLP, multimodal AI, and cognitive/social science advances.
• Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment
• Mentor junior scientists and engineers
• Bridge research initiatives with practical engineering implementation

Skills

Java

C++

Python

PyTorch

JAX

LLMs

Multimodal AI

Reinforcement learning

Research publications

Education

PhD

Master's degree

Tools

TensorFlow

scikit-learn

Spark

Hadoop

MxNet

Job description

Amazon is seeking an Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Applied Scientist to develop expressive, socially intelligent robot interactions. The role focuses on verbal and non-verbal conversational systems, social dynamics, memory, and long-term human-robot relationships.

Responsibilities include leading projects from conception to deployment, mentoring junior scientists, and bridging research with practical engineering for robotics and consumer AI products. Strong publication record required.