Principal Applied Scientist, FAR (Frontier AI & Robotics)

Description

Join the next revolution in robotics at Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team, where you'll work alongside world-renowned AI pioneers to lead key initiatives in robotic intelligence. As a Principal 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 state-of-the-art 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

• 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

• Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish

• Guide technical direction for specific research initiatives, ensuring robust performance in production environments

• Mentor and support 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

A day in the life

• Develop and implement novel foundation model architectures, working hands-on with our extensive compute infrastructure

• Guide and support fellow scientists in solving complex technical challenges, from sim2real transfer to efficient multi-task learning

• Lead focused technical initiatives from conception through deployment, ensuring successful integration with production systems

• Drive technical discussions within your team and with key stakeholders

• Conduct experiments and prototype new ideas using our massive compute cluster

• 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 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.

Basic Qualifications

• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience

• 5+ years of industry or academic research experience

• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language

• 5+ years of building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application experience

• Experience in patents or publication at top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, RSS, CoRL).

• Extensive track record of leading technical projects.

• Experience mentoring junior scientists / engineers.

• Demonstrated expertise in deep learning and model development.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as first-author publications at major conferences

• Experience leading research initiatives in robotics or foundation models

• Track record of successful production ML deployments

• Experience with large-scale distributed systems

• Experience in technical leadership and team mentorship

• Experience bridging research with practical engineering implementation

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.

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 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 $179,000/year in our lowest geographic market up to $309,400/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 . This position will remain posted until filled. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site.