Sr. Applied Scientist, Personal Robotics Group

DESCRIPTION:

Join the Personal Robotics Group at Amazon, where you'll help pioneer intelligent robotic products that deliver meaningful customer experiences. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you'll drive technical excellence in robotic task planning, developing and improving algorithms that enable robots to learn and execute complex tasks in dynamic real-world environments, while establishing evaluation and benchmarking methodology to measure system performance.

In this role, you will combine hands-on technical work with scientific rigor, researching and developing novel approaches to task planning and understanding, improving models to enhance performance, and designing experiments and benchmarks that drive measurable progress. You'll leverage Amazon's computational resources and robotics infrastructure to tackle ambitious challenges in areas such as task planning, task understanding, reasoning, and human-robot interaction.

Key job responsibilities
- Research and develop novel approaches to robotic task planning, task understanding, and reasoning to improve system performance
- Design and implement evaluation frameworks and benchmarks for robotic planning systems, driving measurable improvements
- Explore and fine-tune models to enhance robot capabilities across diverse tasks and environments
- Build and maintain datasets and data collection pipelines for training and evaluating models
- Define quantitative metrics and success criteria that connect evaluation results to real-world robot performance
- Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate research findings and evaluation into development workflows
- Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure holistic improvement of robot capabilities
- Stay current with the latest advancements in robotics, task planning, and AI research

A day in the life
- Research and prototype new approaches to improve task planning and understanding capabilities
- Design and run experiments to identify limitations of current approaches, documenting findings and proposing improvements
- Fine-tune and iterate on models to improve performance across diverse scenarios
- Build and iterate on evaluation pipelines that measure system quality and reliability

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, task planning, 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
- 3+ years of industry or academic research experience
- Experience with programming languages such as Python, Java, C++
- Experience designing experiments with quantitative evaluation and benchmarking methodology for AI or robotics systems
- Experience with LLMs, VLMs, or large multimodal models and their evaluation challenges
- Experience with robotics task planning, reasoning, or complex task understanding

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

- Strong publication record at major conferences (RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, HRI, NeurIPS, ICML, or similar)
- Experience building evaluation pipelines or benchmarks for robotics or AI systems
- Experience with model fine-tuning and training for robotics applications
- Experience with complex task decomposition and multi-modal task understanding
- Experience with simulation environments for robotics
- The ability to work with minimal guidance, be proactive, deal with ambiguity, and thrive with quickly evolving goals
- Demonstrated experimental mindset with a track record of hypothesis-driven research
- Experience bridging research with practical engineering implementation in robotics systems

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 customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company's reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you're applying in isn't listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, CA, Sunnyvale - 192,200.00 - 260,000.00 USD annually