Senior Applied Scientist, Robotics — Learned Manipulation

Amazon; Seattle, Northern (WA, KY); Hybrid; USD 167,000 - 226,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

RSUs

401(k) matching

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Amazon Robotics in Seattle seeks a Senior Applied Scientist to advance learned controllers and manipulation behaviors for production robots in fulfillment centers. You will push the boundaries of planning, control, and ML, choosing when learned approaches supersede engineered solutions while leveraging real-world data.

The role emphasizes RL and behavior cloning, collaboration across disciplines, and mentoring junior scientists.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s degree with 6+ years of applied research in robotics or ML
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• 4+ years of robotics work cells and control systems experience
• 3+ years of building and deploying ML models for robotics applications
• Track record of training reinforcement learning or imitation learning policies in simulation and transferring to physical robots

Responsibilities

• Drive the development of 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 system performance
• Design and deploy learning pipelines that take policies from simulation training to real-time execution on physical robots
• Develop models that predict manipulation outcomes and inform behaviour selection under uncertainty
• Own the development of scalable, real-time implementations and establish engineering standards
• Use operational data to identify failure modes and drive policy improvements
• Mentor junior scientists and engineers to raise applied science rigor
• Represent Amazon in academia through publications and presentations

Skills

Java

C++

Python

Reinforcement learning

Robotics control

Education

PhD or Master’s degree in a relevant field

Tools

ROS

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

Amazon Robotics in Seattle seeks a Senior Applied Scientist to advance learned controllers and manipulation behaviors for production robots in fulfillment centers. You will push the boundaries of planning, control, and ML, choosing when learned approaches supersede engineered solutions while leveraging real-world data.

The role emphasizes RL and behavior cloning, collaboration across disciplines, and mentoring junior scientists.