Applied Scientist III, 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 lead key initiatives in robotic intelligence. 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, scence understanding, sim2real transfer, multi-modal foundation models, and multi-task learning, designing novel algorithms that bridge the gap between cutting-edge 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 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 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, led by pioneering AI researchers Pieter Abbeel, Rocky Duan, and Peter Chen, is building the future of intelligent robotics through groundbreaking 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.