Senior Applied Scientist, Personal Robotics Group

Robots are about to step out of the movies and into our homes. If you're excited about this robotics revolution, come join Amazon's Personal Robotics Group. As an Applied Scientist in this org, you'll push the state-of-the-art techniques in Robotics. You'll drive technical excellence in areas such as perception, manipulation, sim2real transfer, reinforcement learning and multi-task learning, designing novel algorithms that bridge the gap between research and real-world deployment.

In this role, you will integrate hands-on technical expertise with scientific leadership, ensuring your team delivers robust solutions for dynamic real-world environments. While staying updated with the latest advancements in robotics research, you will leverage your experience and expertise to guide the team towards the most promising direction. Collaborating with a talented group of software engineers and scientists, you will bring your ideas to fruition. Deploying robots in home environments requires you to anticipate challenges not encountered in structured settings like warehouses. Additionally, consumer-grade sensors and actuators necessitate working around their limitations, requiring out-of-the-box innovative ideas. As such, you are someone who truly enjoys thinking about problems using first principles at a holistic and systems level to address the aforementioned challenges.


Key job responsibilities
- Lead technical initiatives in areas such as robotics foundation models, reinforcement learning and manipulation - - Design experiments to identify the limitations of current state-of-the-art models and developing new models or techniques that can surpass these models
- Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish
- Mentor fellow scientists while maintaining strong individual technical contributions
- Collaborate with engineering teams to optimize and scale models for real-world applications
- Influence technical decisions and implementation strategies within your area of focus
- Experienced in communicating complex technical work to a non-technical audience
- The ability to work with minimal guidance, be proactive and to handle ambiguity and the challenge of quickly evolving goals


A day in the life
- Train ML models for deployment in simulation and real-world robots, identify and document their limitations post-deployment
- Drive technical discussions within your team and with key stakeholders to develop innovative solutions to address identified limitations
- Guide fellow scientists in solving complex technical challenges, from sim2real transfer to training RL policies
- Mentor team members while maintaining significant hands-on contribution to technical solutions


About the team
The Personal Robotics Group is pioneering intelligent robotic products that deliver meaningful customer experiences. We're building the next generation of robotic systems that will redefine how customers interact with technology. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of personal robotics working with world-class teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotic manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction.

Join us if you’re passionate about creating the future of personal robotics, solving complex challenges at the intersection of hardware and software, and seeing your innovation deliver transformative customer experiences.

Basic Qualifications

- PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning
- Hands-on experience with RL policy training and deployment for robotics

Preferred Qualifications

- PhD in engineering, technology, computer science, machine learning, robotics, operations research, statistics, mathematics or equivalent quantitative field
- Have publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
- Experience with training and deploying machine learning systems to solve large-scale optimizations, or experience with software development lifecycle
- Hand-on experience of deploying Deep Learning models on robots
- Experience in developing Vision Language Action (VLA) models and/or Reinforcement learning for robot manipulation

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 custome