Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Robotics - Vulcan

What you'll do

• Develop and deploy motion planning, control, decision-making, and learning systems from research prototypes to production robots.
• Build simulation-to-robot learning pipelines and models that predict manipulation outcomes and guide behavior selection under uncertainty.
• Analyze operational data to improve policies, deliver production-quality implementations, mentor colleagues, and present research.

What they ask for

• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience.
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or a related language.
• 4+ years of robotics work cells and control systems experience; 3+ years building and deploying machine learning models for robotics applications.
• Track record of training reinforcement learning or imitation learning policies in simulation and transferring them to physical robotic systems.

Nice to have

• Experience with sim-to-real transfer at scale or deploying learned policies in production environments with uptime and reliability requirements.
• Experience designing reinforcement-learning reward functions and curricula; publications in top robotics or machine-learning venues.

Pay

167,100.00 - 226,100.00 USD annually (base salary)

Tools

Java, C++, Python, reinforcement learning, imitation learning

AI focus

Applies reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and learned policies to robotic manipulation, including sim-to-real transfer and outcome prediction.