Social
A child sits in a chair at a kitchen counter, wearing headphones while watching a Fire tablet
As children spend more hours in front of screens, it is increasingly important to investigate the effects of digital technology. Boston Children’s Hospital launched the Digital Wellness Lab, a research center providing science-based recommendations for parents and caretakers.

Amazon Kids links up with Boston Children’s Hospital’s Digital Wellness Lab

Science-based recommendations from the Digital Wellness Lab could inform the development of digital products that help children.

By Mariana Lenharo
May 24, 2021
6 min read
Share

Parents worldwide are confronted with a similar question: What is the impact of screen time in the lives of their children?

As children spend more hours in front of screens, it becomes increasingly important to investigate the effects of digital technology on their brains, bodies, and behaviors.

To assist that effort, experts at Boston Children’s Hospital recently launched the Digital Wellness Lab, a research center providing practical, science-based recommendations for parents and caretakers on how to raise healthy children in the digital age.

Amazon Kids, one of the supporters of the initiative, provides free tools for parents to make choices about how their children interact with devices such as Amazon Fire tablets, Kindle e-readers, Echo smart speakers, and Fire TV.

The team says it hopes to utilize Digital Wellness Lab research as it continues to develop new products that help children explore quality content online while informing and empowering parents.

Officially launched in March, the Digital Wellness Lab is an evolution of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children's Hospital, which had been investigating the impact of media use on children’s mental and physical health for almost 20 years.

Michael Rich and David Bickham
Michael Rich, left, is the founder and director of the Digital Wellness Lab. David Bickham, right, is the lab's research scientist lead.
Glynis Condon

For the past couple of decades, the amount and the quality of research in this field has increased significantly, but its results remained mostly restricted to academia.

“It struck me that, no matter how wonderful our research was, until we got it into the hands of the people who could actually change the digital environment, we were going to be spinning our wheels,” said pediatrician Michael Rich, the lab’s founder and director.

He notes that while the tech industry is highly competitive, this is a topic where companies are collaborating to address the common concern over impact of technology on children. The Digital Wellness Lab originated from the idea that, by working together with industry, science could foster real change in devices, platforms, and software in ways to promote the wellness of individuals and society.

Amazon Kids’ support for science

Karen Ressmeyer, Amazon Kids director of Family Trust, describes the alliance with the Digital Wellness Lab as a win-win situation.

“This collaboration provides us with new insights and data from the lab to help our mission of contributing to a positive digital environment,” she said.

The goal of Amazon Kids and Amazon Kids+ — a subscription service providing access to thousands of books, movies, TV shows, and educational curated content — is to give children the freedom to explore high-quality content in a kid-friendly environment within parameters set by their parents or caretakers.

Karen Ressmeyer, left, is Amazon Kids director of Family Trust. Catherine Teitelbaum, right,
Karen Ressmeyer, left, is Amazon Kids director of Family Trust. Catherine Teitelbaum, right, is principal, Family Trust at Amazon Kids.
Glynis Condon

Working with the Digital Wellness Lab furthers that goal in a unique fashion, according to Catherine Teitelbaum, principal, Family Trust at Amazon Kids. “With this partnership we are intentionally creating a forum to discuss ideas of all sizes and learn from researchers, academics, and clinicians as we look to constantly strengthen our commitment to the wellness of kids and families,” she said.

While tech companies like Amazon can conduct research on their own to address concerns about the impact of technology on children’s mental health, this arrangement offers the ability to develop fundamental research that is completely independent and agnostic to outcomes, noted Rich.

“Our goal is to offer a resource that can inform both sides of the paradigm — the producers and the consumers — to move what they create and what they consume toward a better place in terms of physical, mental and social health,” he said.

Investigating how technology affects children

At the moment, one of the main research questions related to wellness and technology is how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the use of technology by children.

One of the first efforts by the Digital Wellness Lab was a national survey with parents of children from kindergarten to grade 12 that showed as kids’ media use increased during the pandemic, so did the frequency of arguments with their parents over that usage. However, the survey found that spike did not owe purely to kids streaming videos.

“We also found that over 70% of children were using these devices to connect with their family and their friends, and this was true across all age groups,” said David Bickham, research scientist lead at the Digital Wellness Lab. When asked if media use was helpful or hurtful for their children, more than half of the parents said it was helpful for their social relationships and educational achievements.

That more nuanced understanding is a departure from the historically high degree of polarization around this topic, Rich observed. “You were either for kids or for screens, but you couldn't be for both,” he said. Having had an earlier career as a screenwriter and filmmaker – which included working as assistant director to Akira Kurosawa in Japan – he knew that people who were making media were not out to hurt kids.

Bickham noted that, rather than trying to label whether media use is fundamentally good or bad, the lab is trying to identify these types of nuances.

Open research questions

Historically, this field of research hasn’t determined clear causal relationships between types of screen use and mental and physical health outcomes, which constitutes an important gap, according to Rich.

What we want to do is start to move from correlations to understanding what type of screen use contributes to which outcomes.
Michael Rich

“For example, we don't know whether playing violent video games makes kids more violent, or whether more violent kids are drawn to violent video games,” he explained. “We just see correlations, and what we want to do is start to move from correlations to understanding what type of screen use contributes to which outcomes.”

The way to get there, notes Rich, is through long-term longitudinal studies, a type of research that follows the subjects for several years and collects data on different variables periodically. The Digital Wellness Lab has a project to do exactly that. The Growing Up Digital project is a 10-year longitudinal study that plans to have at least one site in each of the six populated continents.

“We are going to follow two cohorts of children, from preschool to middle school, and from middle school to young adulthood, on an annual basis measuring in a deep way not just the screens they are actively using, but also those they are ambiently exposed to,” Rich noted.

The study will measure several outcomes related to learning, mental health, and physical health, such as sleep, exercise and nutrition.

The program is already underway in Australia and Canada, and the group is having conversations with institutions from countries like India and Brazil to set up the study in those geographies as well.

bchimage.png
The Digital Wellness Lab is an evolution of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children's Hospital.
Courtesy of Boston Children's Hospital

The lab also hopes to look at how the use of technology differs across cultures. Previous work by the group looked into digital media usage and play in young children from the United States and Mexico. While, in the U.S., “media use may have displaced time dedicated to certain types of play,” the opposite was true in Mexico: “play seemed to facilitate or positively co-occur with media use.”

“When you think about not just the amount of time spent with screens, but the characteristics of technology use and cultural differences, you start to reveal a more nuanced understanding of how technology impacts kids and their development,” Bickham said.

According to Rich, researchers in this field are coming to realize that it's not about the total duration of screen use, but what we are doing on the screens and the context in which we are doing it. In order to empower families to evaluate what type of technology use is healthy for their children, the lab recently published the Family Digital Wellness Guide, which gives science-based practical advice on the topic for parents and caretakers.

Empowering families is also one of the main goals of Amazon Kids.

“That is so closely tied with our focus at Amazon Kids,” said Teitelbaum, “where we have a long history of building not just products that are safe for kids and designed for kids, but engaging with parents through our parent dashboard, providing them choices to shape their children’s use of media.”

Tags
About the Author
Mariana Lenharo
Mariana is a science and health journalist based in Brazil.

Related content

Work with us

See more jobs See more jobs
Member of Technical Staff, PM-T, Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR)
US, CA, San Francisco
We are seeking a Product Manager, Data Strategy & Physical AI to define and execute the long-term product vision for FAR's AI-powered robotics platform. The intersection of foundation models and physical intelligence is creating a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine how intelligent systems perceive, reason, and act in the real world. We need a visionary product leader who can treat data as our primary competitive moat and translate research frontiers into scalable, production-grade capabilities. In this role, you will champion our core data strategy for foundation model creation, building a partner and tool ecosystem to systematically acquire, label, and iteratively improve physical AI datasets. You will architect a continuous data collection flywheel across deployed robot fleets, transforming real-world kinematics, video, and force-torque telemetry from edge operations back into high-fidelity training tokens. Recognizing the limitations of real-world environments, you will also lead the strategy to create high-fidelity synthesized datasets, utilizing advanced physics engines and simulation to generate diverse training tokens at massive scale. Key job responsibilities Data Acquisition & Labeling Ecosystem: Establish the partnerships, tools, and vendor pipelines necessary to acquire, curate, and continuously label multi-modal datasets for training large-scale models. Fleet Data Flywheel Infrastructure: Architect the framework for a continuous data flywheel that securely streams high-frequency kinematics, egocentric video, and force-torque telemetry from real-world robot fleets back into the training loop. Synthetic Data & Simulation Strategy: Define the strategy for generating high-fidelity, physics-aligned synthesized datasets using advanced simulation environments to scale training tokens for edge-case scenarios and long-horizon tasks. Data Compliance & Governance: Partner with operations, privacy, legal, and security teams to build enterprise-grade data management pipelines that programmatically enforce data minimization, anonymization, and CCPA/GDPR compliance. Data Quality & Token Curation: Implement automated telemetry filtering and dataset pruning strategies to identify high-value operational logs, eliminate redundant fleet data, and optimize training compute costs. Cross-Functional Physical AI Delivery: Act as the strategic bridge between machine learning research scientists, simulation developers, robotics engineers, and hardware teams to deliver data-ready platform features that improve physical reliability. 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 frontier 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 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.
Applied Scientist, End User Messaging, AWS Applied AI Solutions Core Services
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we're advancing the frontier of trust and safety systems for cloud-based communication services. Our vision is to be the trusted foundation for transforming every business with Amazon AI teammates. Our mission is to deliver turnkey, enterprise-grade foundational AI capabilities that create delightful AI powered solutions. We're building sophisticated AI systems that protect infrastructure from evolving threats while enabling legitimate high-volume users to operate without friction, with messaging services at scale as a key application area. Key job responsibilities - Develop advanced machine learning approaches and agentic systems that autonomously adapt to evolving threat patterns across cloud communication services - Create behavioral detection models that quickly identify malicious patterns after onboarding rather than creating friction during signup - Design intelligent resource allocation algorithms that optimize service delivery based on real-time feedback - Develop frameworks operating at scale across diverse usage patterns, analyzing hundreds of thousands of daily active customers - Research novel approaches combining AI agents with trust and safety systems to solve complex security problems - Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate science components into production systems - Conduct rigorous experimentation and establish evaluation frameworks to measure solution performance A day in the life As an Applied Scientist, you'll develop fraud detection algorithms and AI-powered security systems while maintaining a clear path to customer impact. You'll investigate novel approaches to behavioral analysis, develop methods for real-time reputation assessment, and validate ideas through rigorous experimentation. You'll collaborate with other scientists and engineers to transform research insights into scalable solutions, work directly with enterprise customers to understand requirements, and help shape the future of cloud security technology. About the team Our team is a central science organization supporting multiple product teams across AWS Core Services. We tackle fundamental challenges in AI and machine learning that require novel approaches beyond off-the-shelf solutions. Working at the intersection of machine learning, large language models, and domain-specific applications, we develop practical techniques that advance the state-of-the-art while maintaining a clear path to customer impact. Our team builds deep domain expertise across geospatial intelligence, trust and safety systems, autonomous operations, and other critical areas, collaborating closely with engineering teams to transform research insights into scalable production solutions.
Machine Learning Scientist / Applied Scientist, EU Prime and Marketing Analytics & Science (PRIMAS)
ES, M, Madrid
Are you interested in building the measurement foundation that proves whether targeted, cohort-based marketing actually changes customer behavior at Amazon scale? We are seeking an Applied Scientist to own measurement and experimentation for our Lifecycle Marketing Experimentation roadmap within the PRIMAS (Prime & Marketing Analytics and Science) team. In this role, you will design and execute rigorous experiments that measure the effectiveness of audience-based marketing campaigns across multiple channels, providing the evidence that guides marketing strategy and investment decisions. This is a high-impact role where you will build measurement frameworks from scratch, design experiments that isolate causal effects, and establish the experimental standards for lifecycle marketing across EU. You will work closely with business leaders and the senior science lead to answer critical questions: does targeting specific cohorts (Bargain hunters, Young adults) improve efficiency vs. broad campaigns? Which creative strategies drive behavior change? How should we optimize marketing spend across channels? Key job responsibilities Measurement & Experimentation Ownership: 1. Own measurement end-to-end for lifecycle marketing campaigns – design experiments (RCTs, geo-tests, audience holdouts) that measure campaign effectiveness across marketing channels 2. Build measurement frameworks and experimental best practices that work across different activation platforms and can scale to multiple campaigns 3. Establish experimental standards and tooling for lifecycle marketing, ensuring statistical rigor while balancing business constraints Causal Inference & Analysis: 1. Apply causal inference methods to measure incremental impact of marketing campaigns vs. counterfactual 2. Navigate measurement challenges across different platforms (Meta attribution, LiveRamp, clean rooms, onsite tracking) 3. Analyze experiment results and provide optimization recommendations based on statistical evidence 4. Establish guardrails and success criteria for campaign evaluation About the team The PRIMAS team, is part of a larger tech tech team called WIMSI (WW Integrated Marketing Systems and Intelligence). WIMSI core mission is to accelerate marketing technology capabilities that enable de-averaged customer experiences across the marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Sr Applied Scientist, Applied AI Solutions
US, WA, Seattle
About us As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, our vision is to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon’s unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers’ businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. Our team combines Amazon's real-world experience with state-of-art AI to create opinionated, turnkey solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use. We're building applied AI solutions that businesses love and trust. Our ambition is to become the partner companies rely on to run their business every day—putting AI to work to deliver better customer experiences, operational excellence, and faster innovation. We're a fast-moving, scrappy team building a new agentic product from the ground up. If bias for action is your favorite leadership principle, you'll fit right in. The Role We're seeking a talented Senior Applied Scientist with expertise in large language models, agentic systems, and foundational models. You will be responsible for building the state-of-art multi-agent system, using a handful of methods including fine-tunning, reinforcement learning, etc. You'll accelerate our customer-facing features, contribute to our collaborative and innovative culture, and bring state-of-art applied research that raises the bar for the entire team. Key job responsibilities • Drive end-to-end GenAI projects with high complexity and ambiguity from conception to production • Build, optimize, and deploy ML models while collaborating with software engineers for productionization • Research innovative machine learning approaches and identify new opportunities for GenAI applications • Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of large datasets to develop actionable insights • Establish scalable, automated processes for data analysis, model development, and validation • Present results to senior leadership and collaborate with cross-functional teams About the team Diverse Experiences AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Inclusive Team Culture AWS values curiosity and connection. Our employee-led and company-sponsored affinity groups promote inclusion and empower our people to take pride in what makes us unique. Our inclusion events foster stronger, more collaborative teams. Our continual innovation is fueled by the bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and passionate voices our teams bring to everything we do. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.
Economist I, Prime Video
US, CA, Culver City
Prime Video is an industry leading, high-growth business and a critical driver of Amazon Prime subscriptions, which contributes to customer loyalty and lifetime value. Prime Video is a digital video streaming and download service that offers Amazon customers the ability to rent, purchase or subscribe to a huge catalog of videos. In addition, Prime Video offers a variety of live sport streaming services in multiple locales. The Prime Video Economist team is looking for an Economist to support PV content valuation. As an economist focusing on Prime Video, you will be responsible for understanding the value that the business creates for our customers and to develop new, disruptive innovations to grow global Prime Video usage and customer value. This role requires an individual with strong quantitative modeling skills and the ability to apply statistical/machine learning, structural models, and experimental design methods to large amount of individual level data. The candidate should have strong communication skills, be able to work closely with stakeholders and translate data-driven findings into actionable insights. The successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, with strong attention to detail and ability to work in a fast-paced and ever-changing environment. Key job responsibilities The candidate's responsibilities will include: - Build scalable analytic solutions using state of the art tools based on large datasets - Build causal inference models, conduct statistical/machine learning analyses, or design experiments to measure the value of the business and its many features - Partner closely with Business, Finance, Science, and Tech partners to build prototypes and implement production solutions - Independently identify new opportunities for leveraging economic insights and models in the Video business - Develop and execute product workplans from concept, prototype to production incorporating feedback from customers, scientists and business leaders - Write both technical white papers and business-facing documents to clearly explain complex technical concepts to audiences with diverse business/scientific backgrounds
Applied Scientist, AWS Automated Reasoning
US, MA, Boston
Applied Scientists in AWS Automated Reasoning are dedicated to making AWS the best computing service in the world for customers who require advanced and rigorous solutions for automated reasoning, privacy, and sovereignty. Key job responsibilities The successful candidate will: - Solve large or significantly complex problems that require deep knowledge and understanding of your domain and scientific innovation. - Own strategic problem solving, and take the lead on the design, implementation, and delivery for solutions that have a long-term quantifiable impact. - Provide cross-organizational technical influence, increasing productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience. - Develop strategic plans to identify fundamentally new solutions for business problems. - Assist in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and the community on advanced technical issues. A day in the life This is a unique and rare opportunity to get in early on a fast-growing segment of AWS and help shape the technology, product and the business. You will have a chance to utilize your deep technical experience within a fast moving, start-up environment and make a large business and customer impact. About the team Diverse Experiences Amazon Automated Reasoning values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn't followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don't let it stop you from applying. Why Amazon Automated Reasoning? At Amazon, automated reasoning is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for automated reasoning across all of Amazon's products and services. We offer talented automated reasoning professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores. Inclusive Team Culture In Amazon Automated Reasoning, it's in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest automated reasoning challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices. Training & Career Growth We're continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth's Best Employer. That's why you'll find endless knowledge-sharing, training, and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there's nothing we can't achieve.
Applied Science Manager, Translation Services
US, WA, Seattle
Have you ever wondered how Amazon launches and maintains a consistent customer experience across hundreds of countries and languages it serves its customers? If so, we have an exciting opportunity for you! Translation Services is seeking an Applied Science Manager to own the technical vision and multi-year science roadmap spanning machine translation, multimodal content (image translation, video subtitling), and automated quality evaluation. This leader will manage scientists and MLEs, define research direction for novel problem spaces with limited industry precedent, and bridge science breakthroughs into production-ready systems operating at Amazon scale. As a leader of the Science team of TS, this person will be responsible for leading their team in designing algorithmic solutions based on data and mathematics for translating billions of words annually across 130+ and expanding set of locales. The goal is to build solutions with minimal human touch involved in any language translation and ensure accurate translated text is available to our worldwide customers in a streamlined and optimized manner. With access to vast amounts of data, technology, and a diverse community of talented individuals, you will have the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on the way customers and stakeholders engage with Amazon and our platform worldwide. This role requires strong technical skills, a deep understanding of machine learning approaches, and a solid grasp on NLP and LLM techniques to solve complex language translation challenges. You must have a demonstrated ability for optimizing, developing, launching, and maintaining large-scale production systems. As a key member of the team, you will oversee all aspects of the software lifecycle: design, experimentation, implementation, and testing. You should be willing to dive deep when needed, move rapidly with a bias for action, and get things done. You should have an entrepreneurial spirit, know how to deliver, and long for the opportunity to build pioneering solutions to challenging problems. This role will demand resourcefulness and willingness to learn on both the technical and business side. Key job responsibilities In this role, you will work closely with business partners, applied scientists, software development engineers, and product managers to accelerate building solutions to expand translation capabilities. You will have significant influence on our overall strategy by helping define science and engineering strategy, define product features, drive system architecture, and spearhead the best-practices that enable a quality product. You will also influence the development processes, and develop well-rounded skills such as leadership, and effective project management. Building a strong development team and developing career plans for the scientists and engineers reporting to you will be a key responsibility. Throughout, you should possess creativity, curiosity, and excellent judgment to thrive in an environment of ambiguity. A day in the life You will spend your days collaborating with scientists, developers, customers, stakeholders, and converting the business needs into a data-driven solution. You will support a team to design and execute science products. You will dive deep into the data and balance technical execution with longer term strategy. You will grow and develop your team. About the team Translation Services is entering a phase where the problems ahead are fundamentally different from the problems we've solved. Our text translation stack is production-grade and serving 30+ language pairs across Retail. But the next frontier — image translation, video subtitle localization, long form text and automated quality evaluation — represents novel research problems at Amazon scale with limited industry precedent.
Applied Scientist II - Robotics Simulation, Amazon Robotics R&D
US, MA, Boston
We are looking for an Applied Scientist to join the Robotics Simulation team at Amazon Robotics. In this role you will design, build, and validate the simulation environments and policy training pipelines that enable robots to learn manipulation and mobility skills in simulation and transfer them to real hardware. You will work at the intersection of robotics simulation science and modern Physical AI: building GPU-accelerated RL environments, implementing imitation learning workflows, characterizing sim-to-real gaps, tuning physics parameters against real-world data, and evaluating learned policies both in simulation and on physical robots. You will collaborate closely with SDEs who build platform infrastructure, Technical Artists who create simulation assets, and partner science teams who consume your environments and pipelines for their model development. This is a hands-on, execution-focused role. You will own specific simulation science deliverables end-to-end, from environment design through policy evaluation, with increasing scope and independence over time. You will contribute to technical design discussions, propose improvements to the team's simulation fidelity and training methodology, and help establish best practices for robot learning in simulation. Key job responsibilities * Design and implement GPU-accelerated reinforcement learning and imitation learning environments in NVIDIA Isaac Lab for manipulation and mobility tasks. * Build and maintain policy training pipelines supporting diverse model architectures (diffusion policies, VLAs, behavior cloning, actor-critic RL) and evaluate trained policies in simulation. * Characterize and reduce sim-to-real gaps through systematic validation: compare simulated sensor outputs, kinematics, and dynamics against real-world robot data, then implement targeted improvements. * Implement domain randomization strategies (visual, physics, geometric) to improve policy robustness and transfer to real hardware. * Develop sim-to-real transfer techniques including system identification, physics parameter calibration, and visual domain adaptation. * Create robot embodiment validation tests (joint kinematics, actuator response, contact behavior) to ensure digital twins are faithful to real hardware. * Build data pipelines for recording, replaying, and augmenting demonstration data (from teleoperation or automated trajectory generation) to scale training data volume. * Contribute to end-effector modeling and contact dynamics tuning, ensuring physically plausible gripper and tool interactions in simulation. * Author design documents for new simulation science capabilities and contribute to technical reviews. * Collaborate with partner science teams to understand their model architectures and ensure simulation environments meet their training requirements. A day in the life 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 The Robotics Simulation team is a multidisciplinary organization of SDEs, Applied Scientists, and Technical Artists at Amazon Robotics. We build the simulation infrastructure that powers Physical AI development, from photorealistic synthetic data to GPU-accelerated training environments. Our simulation stack enables robots to be designed, trained, and validated entirely in simulation before physical hardware exists, compressing development timelines and de-risking robotics programs across Amazon. The team delivers end-to-end simulation stacks for Amazon's robotics programs, including high-fidelity robot digital twins, teleoperation data collection infrastructure, scalable synthetic demonstration generation, policy training and inference pipelines (RL, imitation learning, VLAs), domain randomization for sim-to-real transfer, and model validation in simulation. We partner closely with hardware teams, science organizations, and robotics program leads across Amazon Robotics.
Research Scientist, network planning optimization world wide, Supply Chain Optimization Technology
LU, Luxembourg
Have you ever ordered a product on Amazon and when that box with the smile arrived you wondered how it got to you so fast? Have you wondered where it came from and how much it cost Amazon to deliver it to you? We are looking for a Research Scientist who will be responsible to develop cutting-edge scientific solutions to optimize our fulfillment strategy across multiple regions of the world (EU, JP, IN and more), to maximize our Customer Experience and minimize our cost and carbon footprint. You will partner with the worldwide scientific community to help design the optimal fulfillment strategy for Amazon. You will also collaborate with technical teams to develop optimization tools for network flow planning and execution systems. Finally, you will also work with business and operational stakeholders to influence their strategy and gather inputs to solve problems. To be successful in the role, you will need deep analytical skills and a strong scientific background. The role also requires excellent communication skills, and an ability to influence across business functions at different levels. You will work in a fast-paced environment that requires you to be detail-oriented and comfortable in working with technical, business and technical teams.
Data Scientist
US, CA, San Francisco
If you are interested in this position, please apply on Twitch's Career site https://www.twitch.tv/jobs/en/ About Us: Twitch is the world’s biggest live streaming service, with global communities built around gaming, entertainment, music, sports, cooking, and more. It is where thousands of communities come together for whatever, every day. We’re about community, inside and out. You’ll find coworkers who are eager to team up, collaborate, and smash (or elegantly solve) problems together. We’re on a quest to empower live communities, so if this sounds good to you, see what we’re up to on LinkedIn and X, and discover the projects we’re solving on our Blog. Be sure to explore our Interviewing Guide to learn how to ace our interview process. About the Role Join the Monetization team at Twitch, where we build the products that help creators make a living on the platform. You'll work on products like Subscriptions, Bits, and Gifting, and the pricing and packaging decisions behind them. You'll partner closely with product, engineering, finance, and data teams to measure the impact of new features, design and analyze experiments, and apply causal inference methods to inform decisions where A/B testing isn't possible. The work ranges from high-velocity experimentation on consumer-facing products to deeper pricing, policy, and segmentation analyses where causal identification is the central challenge. This role is well-suited for someone with a strong economics or causal ML foundation who wants to apply rigorous statistical thinking to real product decisions at scale. You'll need to be comfortable writing SQL, working with imperfect data, and partnering with stakeholders to turn analysis into product impact. Our team is based at Twitch HQ in San Francisco, CA. You can work in San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; or Seattle, WA You Will - Apply causal inference methods where experimentation isn't feasible - Develop models and analyses that inform pricing, segmentation, and revenue optimization - Design, run, and analyze A/B experiments - Partner with product, engineering, and finance to translate ambiguous business questions into measurement frameworks - Build and maintain dashboards, reporting, and analytical tooling that support ongoing decision-making Perks - Medical, Dental, Vision & Disability Insurance - 401(k) - Maternity & Parental Leave - Flexible PTO - Amazon Employee Discount
See more jobs
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
Get more from Amazon Science
Subscribe to our newsletter

Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2026 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

Social