Senior Applied Scientist: Robot Navigation & Autonomy

Amazon; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 192,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, seeks a Sr. Applied Scientist to advance robot navigation. You will research and develop navigation systems enabling safe, reliable operation in dynamic indoor environments.

Collaborate across teams, publish impactful results, and mentor junior scientists while driving sim-to-real transfer and evaluation. This is a role at the forefront of robotics, uniting perception, planning, and control to deliver practical, human-friendly robots.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s degree with 6+ years of applied research experience.
• 3+ years of industry or academic research experience.
• Strong publication record at major Robotics/ML/AI conferences.
• Experience programming in Python, C++, or related language.
• Experience with sim-to-real transfer for robotic systems.
• Demonstrated track record of leading technical projects.
• Experience mentoring junior scientists/engineers.

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement robust navigation systems that enable reliable autonomous operation in complex, dynamic indoor environments with static and dynamic obstacles.
• Build simulation-based and on-device evaluation frameworks with comprehensive benchmarks and metrics for systematic comparison of navigation methods.
• Conduct sim-to-real transfer experiments, analyzing performance gaps and developing techniques to ensure reliable real-world navigation performance.
• Collaborate with world model, manipulation, and other teams to ensure seamless integration of navigation capabilities into the full robot system.
• Stay current with the latest advances in robot navigation, spatial reasoning, and related fields, and apply relevant findings to improve system performance.
• Mentor fellow scientists and engineers while maintaining strong individual technical contributions.

Skills

Python

C++

Publications

Mentoring

Education

PhD or Master’s + 6+ years research

Job description

Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, seeks a Sr. Applied Scientist to advance robot navigation. You will research and develop navigation systems enabling safe, reliable operation in dynamic indoor environments.

Collaborate across teams, publish impactful results, and mentor junior scientists while driving sim-to-real transfer and evaluation. This is a role at the forefront of robotics, uniting perception, planning, and control to deliver practical, human-friendly robots.