Sr. Applied Scientist, FAR (Frontier AI & Robotics)

Amazon; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to join their groundbreaking Frontier AI & Robotics team. In this pivotal role, you will lead the development of innovative foundation models that empower robots to perceive and interact with the world. You'll engage in hands-on research and technical leadership, working with cutting-edge technologies and vast computational resources to solve complex challenges in robotics. This exciting opportunity allows you to influence the future of intelligent robotics while collaborating with world-class researchers. If you're passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI and robotics, this role is perfect for you.

Benefits

Medical Coverage

Dental Coverage

Vision Coverage

Maternity and Parental Leave

Paid Time Off

401(k) Plan

Qualifications

• PhD or Master's with 6+ years of applied research experience required.
• Strong publication record and experience in deep learning essential.

Responsibilities

• Lead initiatives in robotics foundation models and novel deep learning architectures.
• Mentor scientists while driving technical excellence in production environments.

Skills

Deep Learning

Java

C++

Python

Technical Project Leadership

Mentoring

Education

PhD or Master's degree

6+ years of applied research experience

3+ years of industry or academic research experience

Tools

Robotics Simulation Tools

Distributed Systems

Job description

Job ID: 2851294 | Amazon.com Services LLC

Join the next revolution in robotics at Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you'll spearhead the development of breakthrough foundation models that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways. You'll drive technical excellence in areas such as perception, manipulation, science understanding, sim2real transfer, multi-modal foundation models, and multi-task learning, designing novel algorithms that bridge the gap between research and real-world deployment at Amazon scale.
In this role, you'll combine hands-on technical work with scientific leadership, ensuring your team delivers robust solutions for dynamic real-world environments. You'll leverage Amazon's vast computational resources to tackle ambitious 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

1. Lead technical initiatives in robotics foundation models, driving breakthrough approaches through hands-on research and development in areas like 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.
2. Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish.
3. Guide technical direction for specific research initiatives, ensuring robust performance in production environments.
4. Mentor fellow scientists while maintaining strong individual technical contributions.
5. Collaborate with engineering teams to optimize and scale models for real-world applications.
6. Influence technical decisions and implementation strategies within your area of focus.

A day in the life

1. Develop and implement novel foundation model architectures, working hands-on with our extensive compute infrastructure.
2. Guide fellow scientists in solving complex technical challenges, from sim2real transfer to efficient multi-task learning.
3. Lead focused technical initiatives from conception through deployment, ensuring successful integration with production systems.
4. Drive technical discussions within your team and with key stakeholders.
5. Conduct experiments and prototype new ideas using our massive compute cluster.
6. Mentor team members while maintaining significant hands-on contribution to technical solutions.

Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include:

1. Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage
2. Maternity and Parental Leave Options
3. Paid Time Off (PTO)
4. 401(k) Plan

If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply!

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.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

1. PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
2. 3+ years of industry or academic research experience
3. Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
4. Strong publication record at top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, RSS, CoRL)
5. Strong track record of leading technical projects
6. Experience mentoring junior scientists/engineers
7. Demonstrated expertise in deep learning and model development

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

1. History of impactful first-author publications at major conferences
2. Experience leading research initiatives in robotics or foundation models
3. Track record of successful production ML deployments
4. Experience with large-scale distributed systems
5. History of technical leadership and team mentorship
6. Experience bridging research with practical engineering implementation

Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status.