Member of Technical Staff - Science, Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR)

Amazon Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 550,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics seeks a Member of Technical Staff to advance foundational research and build intelligent robotic systems at scale. You will innovate across perception, locomotion, manipulation, and multi-modal learning, translating breakthroughs into real-world robotics.

You will collaborate with world-class researchers and platform teams, guiding end-to-end robotics projects from idea to production, while mentoring junior researchers and driving independent initiatives.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent research expertise in robotics, ML, or related field.
• Strong publication record and research impact in robotics.

Responsibilities

• Drive independent research initiatives across the robotics stack and foundation models.
• Design and implement novel deep learning architectures for robot understanding and control.
• Guide technical direction for full-stack robotics projects from concept to deployment.
• Collaborate with platform and hardware teams for robust production integration.
• Mentor researchers while maintaining strong individual technical contributions.

Skills

Robotics research

Deep learning

Reinforcement learning

Perception

Education

PhD in CS/Robotics/ML

Tools

PyTorch

ROS

TensorFlow

Job description

Amazon’s Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR) team is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to drive foundational research and build intelligent robotic systems from the ground up. In this role, you will operate at the intersection of cutting‑edge AI research and real‑world robotics - conducting original research, publishing, and deploying your innovations into production systems at Amazon scale. We’re looking for researchers who think from first principles, push the boundaries of what’s possible, and take full ownership of turning breakthrough ideas into working systems.

You will join the next revolution in robotics, where you'll work alongside world‑renowned AI pioneers to push the boundaries of what's possible in robotic intelligence. As a Member of Technical Staff, you'll be at the forefront of developing breakthrough foundation models and full‑stack robotics systems that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways. You'll drive technical excellence and independent research initiatives in areas such as locomotion, manipulation, perception, sim2real transfer, multi‑modal, multi‑task robot learning, designing novel frameworks that bridge the gap between state‑of‑the‑art research and real‑world deployment at Amazon scale.

In this role, you'll balance innovative technical exploration with practical implementation, collaborating with platform teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly in dynamic real‑world environments. You’ll have the freedom to pursue ambitious research directions while leveraging Amazon’s vast computational resources to tackle ambiguous problems in areas like very large multi‑modal robotic foundation models and efficient, promptable model architectures that can scale across diverse robotic applications.

Key job responsibilities

• Drive independent research initiatives across the robotics stack, including robot co‑design, dexterous manipulation mechanisms, innovative actuation strategies, state estimation, low‑level control, system identification, reinforcement learning, sim-to-real transfer, as well as foundation models focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation, for example open‑vocabulary panoptic scene understanding, scaling up multi‑modal LLMs, sim2real/real2sim techniques, end‑to‑end vision‑language‑action models, efficient model inference, video tokenization
• Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish
• Guide technical direction for full‑stack robotics projects from conceptualization through deployment, taking a system‑level approach that integrates hardware considerations with algorithmic development, ensuring robust performance in production environments
• Collaborate with platform and hardware teams to ensure seamless integration across the entire robotics stack, optimizing and scaling models for real‑world applications
• Contribute to team's technical decisions and influence implementation strategies to help shape our approach to next‑generation robotics challenges
• Mentor fellow researchers while maintaining solid individual technical contributions

A day in the life

• Design and implement novel foundation model architectures and innovative systems and algorithms, leveraging our extensive infrastructure to prototype and evaluate at scale
• Collaborate with our world‑class research team to solve complex technical challenges across the full robotics stack
• Lead focused technical initiatives from conception through deployment, ensuring successful integration with production systems
• Drive technical discussions and brainstorming sessions with team leaders, fellow researchers and key stakeholders
• Conduct experiments and prototype new ideas using our massive compute cluster and extensive robotics infrastructure
• Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that can handle the complexities of real‑world robotics applications

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 innovative 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.

Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world‑class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.