Senior Applied Scientist - Robotics

Job Overview

The Amazon Robotics team is looking for a Senior Applied Scientist who will leverage advanced research trends to address real-world challenges in robotics and artificial intelligence. The selected candidate will join a multidisciplinary team responsible for designing, building, and deploying complete robotic systems as well as developing core infrastructure and tools supporting collaborative deployment of these systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct research, design, implement, and evaluate sophisticated perception, motion planning, and decision-making algorithms that integrate multiple disciplines and employ machine learning techniques.
• Develop experimental setups and prototype new learning algorithms and predictive models.
• Collaborate closely with software engineers to transform prototypes into scalable, real-time applications.
• Partner with machine learning and robotic control specialists to implement and deploy algorithms such as machine learning models.
• Work alongside hardware engineers throughout system prototyping to production development.
• Engage with the academic community through publications and scientific presentations representing Amazon's interests.
• Coordinate with stakeholders from hardware, scientific, and operations teams to iterate and improve system design and implementation.

Required Qualifications

• PhD in engineering, technology, computer science, machine learning, robotics, operations research, statistics, mathematics, or a related quantitative discipline.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Java, C++, Python, or similar.
• Experience implementing cutting-edge scene understanding, computer vision algorithms, and/or robotic manipulation and motion planning approaches.
• Proven track record delivering practical robotics solutions.
• Demonstrated leadership experience guiding interdisciplinary teams specializing in computer vision and robotic manipulation.
• Strong record of publishing at leading robotics and related conferences (e.g., RSS, NIPS, ICRA, CVPR, CORL, ICCV) or journals (IJRR, IEEE TRO, JMLR).
• Experience mentoring and supporting the professional growth of junior team members.

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD with relevant academic or industry research focused on robotic computer vision or motion planning/control algorithms.
• Experience working with large-scale data gathering and machine learning models tailored for robotics products, including large vision models and transformers.
• Knowledge of hardware trade-offs such as sensor selection and diverse systems architectures including real-time, embedded, and distributed systems.
• Track record of interdisciplinary work that integrates hardware, software, and algorithm co-design.
• Experience with physics simulation engines and transitioning algorithms from simulation environments to real-world applications.
• Background in developing and maintaining sophisticated software architectures for robotic systems.
• Demonstrated ability to incubate innovative technology from concept through large-scale deployment.

Diversity and Inclusion

Amazon is committed to fostering a diverse workforce and is an equal opportunity employer. Hiring decisions are based purely on skills and experience. The company offers accommodations for candidates with disabilities during the hiring process.

Location

The position is based onsite in Berlin, Germany with the Amazon Development Center Germany GmbH.