Member of Technical Staff - Robotics, Frontier AI Robotics

Amazon; Berwick (Columbia County); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical benefits

Equity and sign-on payments

Financial and other incentives

Job summary

Amazon is seeking a Member of Technical Staff specializing in Robotics. This role includes responsibilities like integrating sensors across robotics platforms and improving runtime systems. The ideal candidate will need a bachelor's in computer science and 5+ years of relevant software development experience.

The position offers a salary of $150,000-$300,000 per year, based on geographical location within the United States, along with comprehensive benefits and equity options.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software development experience.
• Experience working closely with hardware, ML, or controls teams.
• Experience designing and shipping software systems across distributed processes.

Responsibilities

• Bring up and integrate sensors and actuators across diverse platforms.
• Build and improve the multi-process Python and ROS 2 runtime.
• Diagnose and fix bottlenecks across the middleware and perception pipeline.

Skills

software development

C++/Python interop

experience as a tech lead

low-level driver work

optimizing data plane performance

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science

Tools

ROS 2

asyncio

NumPy/JAX

Job description

Member of Technical Staff – Robotics, Frontier AI Robotics

Job ID: 10450291 | Amazon.com Services LLC

Help us build the software stack underneath Frontier AI & Robotics: the layer between hardware and the AI policies running on it. You’ll work end-to-end across the stack, from bringing up sensors and actuators at the HW/SW boundary, to hardening the multi-process runtime that ties them together, to shipping the framework changes that let the rest of the team move faster.

This is a generalist role with a real systems edge. We need someone equally at home down at the sensor and OS boundary (drivers, IPC, real-time behavior, profiling) and up in robotics application code (most of it Python). You’ll spend stretches of a few days to a few weeks each on things like bringing up a new sensor at the protocol layer, chasing a flaky USB camera at the kernel boundary, generalizing the camera stack, cutting perception latency, porting code onto edge compute, or chasing a DDS/ROS 2 performance regression.

You’ll work with sharp, motivated engineers across hardware, ML research, controls, and ops on continuously changing problems at the frontier of AI and robotics. The role rewards engineers who communicate clearly, invest in cross-team relationships, and ship.

Key job responsibilities

• Bring up and integrate sensors, actuators, and edge compute across diverse robotics hardware platforms.
• Build and improve the multi-process Python and ROS 2 runtime: process management, IPC, observability, lifecycle.
• Diagnose and fix bottlenecks across the stack: middleware performance (DDS, ROS 2), perception pipeline latency, edge inference throughput, system-level resource contention.
• Generalize one-off solutions into reusable infrastructure (camera stacks, telemetry pipelines, edge deployment tooling) that scales across hardware platforms and use cases.
• Port code onto the constrained edge-compute platforms our robots run. Make it work, then make it work well.
• Identify gaps in the team’s velocity, whether that’s a missing piece of infrastructure or a fragile sensor that nobody has time to fix, and close them.
• Make proper tradeoffs between prototyping and production software.

About the team

At Frontier AI & Robotics, we’re not just advancing robotics – we’re reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through frontier foundation models and end-to-end learned systems. We tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real-world scenarios.

What sets us apart is our unique combination of ambitious research vision and practical impact. We leverage Amazon’s massive computational infrastructure and rich real-world datasets to train and deploy state-of-the-art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence – from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We’re building systems that don’t just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon’s global operations.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent.
• 5+ years of software development experience.
• Experience with C++/Python interop or other hybrid-language stacks.
• Experience as a tech lead, mentor, or technical owner of an engineering team or significant component. Experience designing and shipping software systems that run across distributed processes, edge devices, or real-time constraints.
• Experience working closely with hardware, ML, or controls teams as the software counterpart.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with low-level driver work and sensor bring-up across protocols (I2C, SPI, USB, MIPI, CAN).
• Experience optimizing data plane performance: DDS tuning, kernel networking, shared memory IPC, real-time scheduling.
• Experience with ROS 2 or other robotics middleware in production.
• Experience deploying ML inference at the edge under latency and memory constraints.
• Experience with multi-process Python lifecycles and writing performant Python (asyncio, multiprocessing, NumPy/JAX vectorization, GIL-aware design).
• Web application or full-stack web experience is a bonus.

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Benefits

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several U.S. geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $150,000/year in our lowest geographic market up to $300,000/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors, including market location, and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits.