Applied Scientist, FAR (Frontier AI & Robotics)

Join the next revolution in robotics at Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team, where you'll work alongside world-renowned AI pioneers like Pieter Abbeel, Rocky Duan, and Peter Chen to push the boundaries of what's possible in robotic intelligence. As an Applied Scientist, you'll be at the forefront of developing breakthrough foundation models that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways. You'll drive independent research initiatives in areas such as perception, manipulation, scence understanding, sim2real transfer, multi-modal foundation models, and multi-task learning, designing novel algorithms that bridge the gap between state-of-the-art research and real-world deployment at Amazon scale.
In this role, you'll balance innovative technical exploration with practical implementation, collaborating with platform teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly in dynamic real-world environments. You'll have access to Amazon's vast computational resources, enabling you 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
- Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish
- Drive independent research initiatives in robotics foundation models, focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation, for example 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
- Lead technical projects from conceptualization through deployment, ensuring robust performance in production environments
- Collaborate with platform teams to optimize and scale models for real-world applications
- Contribute to the team's technical strategy and help shape our approach to next-generation robotics challenges

A day in the life
- Design and implement novel foundation model architectures, leveraging our extensive compute infrastructure to train and evaluate at scale
- Collaborate with our world-class research team to solve complex technical challenges
- Lead technical initiatives from conception to deployment, working closely with robotics engineers to integrate your solutions into production systems
- Participate in technical discussions and brainstorming sessions with team leaders and fellow scientists
- Leverage our massive compute cluster and extensive robotics infrastructure to rapidly prototype and validate new ideas
- Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that can handle the complexities of real-world robotics applications

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, led by pioneering AI researchers Pieter Abbeel, Rocky Duan, and Peter Chen, is building the future of intelligent robotics through ground breaking 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.
- PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application
- Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
- Experience applying theoretical models in an applied environment
- Experience developing and implementing deep learning models
- Track record of solving complex technical problems- Experience using Unix/Linux
- First-author publications at major or top-tier ML / robotics conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, RSS, CoRL)
- Experience with foundation models or large language models
- Background in computer vision, robotics, or related fields
- Experience with sim2real transfer or multi-task learning
- Familiarity with distributed training systems
- Track record of deploying ML models in production environments
- Experience with large-scale machine learning systems
- Extensive programming skills in Python and PyTorch/JAX

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.

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.

Pursuant to the San Francisco 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.

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $136,000/year in our lowest geographic market up to $223,400/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, please visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. This position will remain posted until filled. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site.