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A grid shows images from the top Amazon Science articles of 2021, the year 2021 can be seen in an overlay
These are images from some of the most engaging stories published on Amazon Science in 2021.

The top Amazon Science articles of 2021

From quantum chess to robot arms to body fat percentage and ML-powered grocery shopping, these 10 articles resonated with readers in 2021.

By Staff writer
December 28, 2021
2 min read
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  1. An Amazon quantum computing scientist wins the first-ever quantum chess tournament
    A picture of Aleksander Kubica
    Aleksander Kubica, research scientist with the AWS quantum computing team
    Credit: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

    Not only did Aleksander Kubica, a research scientist with the AWS quantum computing team, win the first-ever tournament, he did so having played quantum chess only once — the weekend before the event. Learn about his strategy and watch video from two of his historic matches.

  2. A conversation with Michael I. Jordan, Michael Kearns, and Bernhard Schölkopf
    Larry Hardesty, the Amazon Science blog editor, interviewed Amazon distinguished scientist Bernhard Schölkopf (top right) and Amazon Scholars Michael Kearns (bottom left) and Michael I. Jordan (bottom right).
    Larry Hardesty, the Amazon Science blog editor, interviewed Amazon distinguished scientist Bernhard Schölkopf (top right) and Amazon Scholars Michael Kearns (bottom left) and Michael I. Jordan (bottom right).

    On the cusp of the 2021 NeurIPS conference, the three Amazon-affiliated researchers — all of whom have given the conference’s major named lecture, the Posner lecture — talked about the accelerating interesting in machine learning, its implications for both tech and AI research, and the path forward for AI.

  3. Graceful AI
    Stefano 2.jpg
    Stefano Soatto, vice president of applied science for AWS AI.
    Credit: Todd Cheney

    Stefano Soatto, vice president of applied science for AWS AI, writes, "As machine-learning-based decision systems improve rapidly, we are discovering that it is no longer enough for them to perform well on their own. They should also behave nicely toward their predecessors. When we replace an old trained classifier with a new one, we should expect a smooth transition and a peaceful transfer of decision powers."

  4. A look at the science that powers Amazon's advanced robot arms
    A close up of the Robin robotic arm
    Robin must calculate how to identify, move, and sort parcels that may rest atop one another as they are presented via a conveyor.
    Credit F4D Studio

    Robin, one of the most complex stationary robot arm systems Amazon has ever built, brings many core technologies to new levels and acts as a glimpse into the possibilities of combining vision, package manipulation and machine learning. Learn what separates them from more traditional robot arms — and watch them in action.

  5. Why now is a 'particularly good time' to explore careers in robotics
    A split screen screengrab from a video interview shows Siddhartha Srinivasa, left, director of Amazon Robotics AI, and Nia Jetter, Amazon Robotics AI senior principal technologist, right
    Siddhartha Srinivasa, left, director of Amazon Robotics AI, and Nia Jetter, Amazon Robotics AI senior principal technologist

    In a video interview, Siddhartha Srinivasa, director of Amazon Robotics AI, and Nia Jetter, Amazon Robotics AI senior principal technologist, discuss inspiration, their roles at Amazon, and tips for pursuing a robotics career. Watch their informative and illuminating discussion about careers in robotics.

  6. A computer vision system that can accurately predict body fat percentage
    Halo App Body Feature2.png
    With Amazon Halo's Body feature, individuals can measure their own body fat percentage and track it through a personalized 3D model.

    A team of Amazon scientists discusses the challenges in developing a system that can accurately estimate body fat percentage and create personalized 3D avatars of users from smartphone photos. Learn how they utilized convolutional neural networks, and semi-supervised learning.

  7. ARA recipient aims to unite the deep learning community
    Michael Bronstein, the chair in Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London
    Michael Bronstein, an Amazon Research Awards (ARA) recipient, is also the chair in Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London
    Dino Dimopoulos

    Michael Bronstein, the chair in Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, is using pioneering machine learning to push the boundaries of drug design, among other things — including unifing the machine learning “zoo”.

  8. The science of operations planning under uncertainty
    An Amazon employee is seen making a delivery while an electric delivery van is parked behind him on a residential street in Los Angeles
    An Amazon employee is seen making a delivery while an electric delivery van is parked behind him on a residential street in Los Angeles
    About Amazon

    When Amazon announced it would purchase 100,000 custom electric delivery vehicles as part of The Climate Pledge, a team of scientists within the Amazon Logistics (AMZL) Research organization took on the challenge of determining the best strategy for deploying them. Based on sophisticated models that simulate Amazon’s shipments and external parameters like power availability in each city, the team is developing a plan to gradually electrify Amazon’s entire fleet.

  9. How machine learning is helping Amazon improve the grocery shopping experience
    Amazon Fresh Prime bag
    From forecasting to selection, Amazon Fresh scientists are developing machine learning models that seek to enhance the grocery shopping experience.

    From forecasting to selection, Amazon Fresh scientists are working through (often open) research challenges to develop machine learning models that seek to enhance the grocery shopping experience. Learn how Amazon Fresh is leveraging scientific innovation to meet increased consumer demand.

  10. Creating sustainable, data-driven buildings
    Sense, Act, and Scale 2
    The path to improving building energy efficiency can be paved with the framework of sense, act, and scale say Bharathan Balaji and Rob Aldrich

    Bharathan Balaji , an Amazon senior research scientist, and Rob Aldrich, senior sustainability strategist, write about what must happen to meet the United Nations Global Status Report goal of making buildings at least 30% more energy efficient in order to achieve Paris Agreement goals.

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Member Of Technical Staff - Hardware Science, Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR)
US, CA, San Francisco
Amazon’s Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR) team is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to drive foundational research and build intelligent robotic systems from the ground up. In this role, you will operate at the intersection of innovative AI research and real-world robotics - conducting original research, publishing, and deploying your innovations into production systems at Amazon scale. We’re looking for researchers who think from first principles, push the boundaries of what’s possible, and take full ownership of turning breakthrough ideas into working systems. You will join the next revolution in robotics, where you'll work alongside world-renowned AI pioneers to push the boundaries of what's possible in robotic intelligence. As a Member of Technical Staff, you'll develop breakthrough foundation models that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world in unprecedented ways—with a strong emphasis on the hardware systems that bring these models to life. You'll drive independent research initiatives in areas such as locomotion, manipulation, motor control, actuator design, sim2real transfer, and multi-modal robot learning, designing novel frameworks that bridge state-of-the-art research with real-world hardware deployment at Amazon scale. In this role, you'll balance innovative technical exploration with hands-on hardware implementation, collaborating with mechanical, electrical, and controls engineering teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly on physical robotic platforms in dynamic real-world environments. You'll have access to Amazon's computational resources and advanced robotics infrastructure—including high degree-of-freedom prototype platforms, custom actuators, and precision sensing systems—enabling you to tackle ambitious problems in areas like multi-modal robotic foundation models, motor-level control optimization, and efficient model architectures that scale across diverse robotic hardware. Key job responsibilities · Drive independent research initiatives across the full robotics stack, including robot co-design, manipulation mechanisms, innovative actuation and motor control strategies, state estimation, low-level control, system identification, reinforcement learning, and sim-to-real transfer, as well as foundation models for perception and manipulation · Lead full-stack robotics projects from conceptualization through hardware deployment, taking a system-level approach that integrates actuator dynamics, sensor feedback (force/torque, IMUs, encoders), and electromechanical constraints with algorithmic development · Develop and optimize control algorithms and sensing pipelines for physical robotic hardware, including motor characterization, actuator performance tuning, and robust sensor integration in production environments · Collaborate with hardware, mechanical, and electrical engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of learned models across the robotics stack—from embedded compute and communication buses to actuator-level control · Contribute to the team's technical strategy and help shape our approach to next-generation hardware-aware robotics challenges, including hardware-in-the-loop validation and prototype-to-deployment transitions A day in the life · Design and implement innovative systems and algorithms, leveraging our extensive computational and robotics hardware infrastructure to prototype and evaluate at scale · Collaborate with hardware and software engineers to solve complex technical challenges spanning motors, actuators, sensors, and learned control · Lead technical initiatives from conception to hardware deployment, working closely with robotics engineers and lab teams to integrate your solutions into physical robotic platforms · Participate in technical discussions and design reviews with team leaders, hardware engineers, and fellow scientists · Leverage our compute cluster and advanced robotics lab—including high-DoF prototype platforms and custom actuation systems—to rapidly prototype and validate new ideas · Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that perform reliably on real-world robotic hardware 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.
Principal Applied Scientist , Amazon Integrated Security
GB, Virtual Location - Uk
Amazon Integrated Security is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to lead research at the intersection of cognitive psychology, measurement science, and AI security. This role will pioneer new approaches to understanding and leveraging behavioral characteristics of autonomous AI systems in security contexts, turning threat actor use of AI into a structural advantage for defenders. Key job responsibilities Establish and lead a novel research program exploring cognitive patterns and biases in agentic AI systems used for offensive security purposes. Design and conduct experiments to understand black-box AI system behavior, develop measurement frameworks for previously unmeasurable security concepts, and translate research findings into actionable defensive strategies and tooling. Create feedback loops between offensive and defensive security teams, collaborate with threat intelligence experts and red team operations, and publish findings that advance both academic understanding and practical security outcomes. Apply measurement science expertise to quantify complex security concepts including risk, business impact, and trust. A day in the life Work closely with a Principal Technologist with AI and security expertise, senior security engineers with threat intelligence backgrounds, offensive AI security teams, and detection/response operations. Mentor junior scientists and engineers while maintaining strong connections with academic research communities.
Senior Applied Scientist, Fauna
US, NY, New York
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to lead the development of evaluation frameworks and data collection protocols for robotic capabilities. In this role, you will focus on designing how we measure, stress-test, and improve robot behavior across a wide range of real-world tasks. Your work will play a critical role in shaping how policies are validated and how high-quality datasets are generated to accelerate system performance. You will operate at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and human-in-the-loop systems, building the infrastructure and methodologies that connect teleoperation, evaluation, and learning. This includes developing evaluation policies, defining task structures, and contributing to operator-facing interfaces that enable scalable and reliable data collection. The ideal candidate is highly experimental, systems-oriented, and comfortable working across software, robotics, and data pipelines, with a strong focus on turning ambiguous capability goals into measurable and actionable evaluation systems. Key job responsibilities - Design and implement evaluation frameworks to measure robot capabilities across structured tasks, edge cases, and real-world scenarios - Develop task definitions, success criteria, and benchmarking methodologies that enable consistent and reproducible evaluation of policies - Create and refine data collection protocols that generate high-quality, task-relevant datasets aligned with model development needs - Build and iterate on teleoperation workflows and operator interfaces to support efficient, reliable, and scalable data collection - Analyze evaluation results and collected data to identify performance gaps, failure modes, and opportunities for targeted data collection - Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate evaluation tooling, logging systems, and data pipelines into the broader robotics stack - Stay current with advances in robotics, evaluation methodologies, and human-in-the-loop learning to continuously improve internal approaches - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - Mentor junior scientists and engineers About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We’re building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful. At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you.
Robotics/AI Motor Control Scientist, Fauna
US, NY, New York
We are seeking a Robotics/AI Motor Control Scientist to develop cutting-edge machine learning algorithms for motor control systems in robots. In this role, you will focus on creating and optimizing intelligent motor control strategies to enable robots to perform complex, whole-body tasks. Your contributions will be essential in advancing robotics by enabling fluid, reliable, and safe interactions between robots and their environments. Key job responsibilities - Develop controllers that leverage reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or other advanced AI techniques to achieve natural, robust, and adaptive motor behaviors - Collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams to integrate motor control systems with robotic hardware, ensuring alignment with real-world constraints such as actuator dynamics and energy efficiency - Use simulation and real-world testing to refine and validate control algorithms - Stay updated on advancements in robotics, AI, and control systems to apply advanced techniques to robotic motion challenges - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - Mentor junior scientists and engineers - Bridge research initiatives with practical engineering implementation About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We’re building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful. At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you. an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you.
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Are you excited about leveraging state-of-the-art Computer Vision algorithms and large datasets to solve real-world problems? Join Amazon as an Applied Scientist Intern and be at the forefront of AI innovation! As an Applied Scientist Intern, you'll work in a fast-paced, cross-disciplinary team of pioneering researchers. You'll tackle complex problems, developing solutions that either build on existing academic and industrial research or stem from your own innovative thinking. Your work may even find its way into customer-facing products, making a real-world impact. Key job responsibilities - Develop novel solutions and build prototypes - Work on complex problems in Computer Vision and Machine Learning - Contribute to research that could significantly impact Amazon's operations - Collaborate with a diverse team of experts in a fast-paced environment - Collaborate with scientists on writing and submitting papers to Tier-1 conferences (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML) - Present your research findings to both technical and non-technical audiences Key Opportunities: - Collaborate with leading machine learning researchers - Access innovative tools and hardware (large GPU clusters) - Address challenges at an unparalleled scale - Become a disruptor, innovator, and problem solver in the field of computer vision - Potentially deliver solutions to production in customer-facing applications - Opportunities to become an FTE after the internship Join us in shaping the future of AI at Amazon. Apply now and turn your research into real-world solutions!
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The Alexa for Shopping team is seeking a customer-obsessed senior economist to own and drive analytics strategy for GenAI-powered Shopping experiences. This role will partner closely with senior leaders to deliver high-quality insights that inform executive decision-making for the AI shopping assistant, Rufus. The successful candidate will demonstrate strong attention to detail, excellent written and verbal communication, and the ability to influence across organizations. In this role, you will mentor and set the bar for data science, economics, and engineering partners by establishing best practices for understanding customer behavior in AI-driven shopping experiences. You will invent and scale metrics that measure customer adoption and habituation, and build agentic, automated analytical workflows that enable fast, repeatable deep dives. This position will play a critical role in shaping product roadmap and investment decisions in a rapidly evolving GenAI space. The ideal candidate will operate effectively in ambiguous environments, exercise strong business judgment on high-impact, one-way door decisions, and continuously raise the bar for analytical rigor and operational excellence. You will work cross-functionally with product, engineering, and economics partners to deliver results for customers Key job responsibilities - Own the development of customer and shopping-mission cohorts to understand behavior with and without Rufus engagement across the end-to-end shopping journey. - Identify which Rufus query types and interaction patterns drive the most customer value for specific customer cohorts and shopping missions. - Build predictive models to estimate customer re-engagement and long-term adoption of Rufus based on interaction quality and downstream shopping outcomes. - Invent, operationalize, and publish scalable metrics and dashboards that surface actionable insights, enabling data-driven product growth and executive decision-making. - Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Economics teams to translate analytical insights into roadmap priorities and customer-focused improvements. About the team The Alexa for Shopping economics team focuses on understanding how GenAI-powered shopping tools are transforming customer behavior across the shopping lifecycle - from inspiration and problem-solving, to product research, selection, purchase, and post-purchase support. We build the foundational measurement frameworks that enable teams to evaluate performance, identify what Rufus experiences resonate most with customers, and uncover opportunities for improvement. Our work directly influences customer-centric product roadmap decisions and helps scale impactful, high-quality AI shopping experiences
Member of Technical Staff - Science, Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR)
US, CA, San Francisco
Amazon’s Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR) team is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to drive foundational research and build intelligent robotic systems from the ground up. In this role, you will operate at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and real-world robotics - conducting original research, publishing, and deploying your innovations into production systems at Amazon scale. We’re looking for researchers who think from first principles, push the boundaries of what’s possible, and take full ownership of turning breakthrough ideas into working systems.  You will join the next revolution in robotics, where you'll work alongside world-renowned AI pioneers to push the boundaries of what's possible in robotic intelligence. As a Member of Technical Staff, you'll be at the forefront of developing breakthrough foundation models and full-stack robotics systems that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways. You'll drive technical excellence and independent research initiatives in areas such as locomotion, manipulation, perception, sim2real transfer, multi-modal, multi-task robot learning, designing novel frameworks that bridge the gap between state-of-the-art research and real-world deployment at Amazon scale. In this role, you'll balance innovative technical exploration with practical implementation, collaborating with platform teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly in dynamic real-world environments. You’ll have the freedom to pursue ambitious research directions while leveraging Amazon’s vast computational resources to tackle ambiguous 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 - Drive independent research initiatives across the robotics stack, including robot co-design, dexterous manipulation mechanisms, innovative actuation strategies, state estimation, low-level control, system identification, reinforcement learning, sim-to-real transfer, as well as foundation models focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation, for example 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 full-stack robotics projects from conceptualization through deployment, taking a system-level approach that integrates hardware considerations with algorithmic development, ensuring robust performance in production environments - Collaborate with platform and hardware teams to ensure seamless integration across the entire robotics stack, optimizing and scaling models for real-world applications - Contribute to team's technical decisions and influence implementation strategies to help shape our approach to next-generation robotics challenges - Mentor fellow researchers while maintaining solid individual technical contributions A day in the life - Design and implement novel foundation model architectures and innovative systems and algorithms, leveraging our extensive infrastructure to prototype and evaluate at scale - Collaborate with our world-class research team to solve complex technical challenges across the full robotics stack - Lead focused technical initiatives from conception through deployment, ensuring successful integration with production systems - Drive technical discussions and brainstorming sessions with team leaders, fellow researchers and key stakeholders - Conduct experiments and prototype new ideas using our massive compute cluster and extensive robotics infrastructure - Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that can handle the complexities of real-world robotics applications 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 innovative 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.
Senior Applied Scientist, Fauna
US, NY, New York
We are seeking a Sr. Applied Scientist to develop cutting-edge machine learning algorithms for motor control systems in robots. In this role, you will focus on creating and optimizing intelligent motor control strategies to enable robots to perform complex, whole-body tasks. Your contributions will be essential in advancing robotics by enabling fluid, reliable, and safe interactions between robots and their environments. Key job responsibilities - Develop controllers that leverage reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or other advanced AI techniques to achieve natural, robust, and adaptive motor behaviors - Collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams to integrate motor control systems with robotic hardware, ensuring alignment with real-world constraints such as actuator dynamics and energy efficiency - Use simulation and real-world testing to refine and validate control algorithms - Stay updated on advancements in robotics, AI, and control systems to apply advanced techniques to robotic motion challenges - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - Mentor junior scientists and engineers - Bridge research initiatives with practical engineering implementation About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We’re building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful. At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you. an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you.
Member of Technical Staff - Hardware Science, Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR)
US, CA, San Francisco
Amazon’s Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR) team is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to drive foundational research and build intelligent robotic systems from the ground up. In this role, you will operate at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and real-world robotics - conducting original research, publishing, and deploying your innovations into production systems at Amazon scale. We’re looking for researchers who think from first principles, push the boundaries of what’s possible, and take full ownership of turning breakthrough ideas into working systems.  You will join the next revolution in robotics, where you'll work alongside world-renowned AI pioneers to push the boundaries of what's possible in robotic intelligence. As a Member of Technical Staff, you'll be at the forefront of developing breakthrough foundation models and full-stack robotics systems that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways. You'll drive technical excellence and independent research initiatives in areas such as locomotion, manipulation, perception, sim2real transfer, multi-modal, multi-task robot learning, designing novel frameworks that bridge the gap between state-of-the-art research and real-world deployment at Amazon scale. In this role, you'll balance innovative technical exploration with practical implementation, collaborating with platform teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly in dynamic real-world environments. You’ll have the freedom to pursue ambitious research directions while leveraging Amazon’s vast computational resources to tackle ambiguous 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 - Drive independent research initiatives across the robotics stack, driving breakthrough approaches through hands-on research and development in areas including robot co-design, dexterous manipulation mechanisms, innovative actuation strategies, state estimation, low-level control, system identification, reinforcement learning, sim-to-real transfer, as well as foundation models focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation. - Lead and Guide technical direction for full-stack robotics projects from conceptualization through deployment, taking a system-level approach that integrates hardware considerations with algorithmic development - Develop and optimize control algorithms and sensing pipelines that enable robust performance in production environments - Collaborate with platform and hardware teams to ensure seamless integration across the entire robotics stack, optimizing and scaling models for real-world applications - Contribute to team's technical decisions and influence implementation strategies to help shape our approach to next-generation robotics challenges - Mentor fellow researchers while maintaining solid individual technical contributions A day in the life - Design and implement novel foundation model architectures and innovative systems and algorithms, leveraging our extensive infrastructure to prototype and evaluate at scale - Collaborate with our world-class research team to solve complex technical challenges across the full robotics stack - Lead focused technical initiatives from conception through deployment, ensuring successful integration with production systems - Drive technical discussions and brainstorming sessions with team leaders, fellow researchers and key stakeholders - Conduct experiments and prototype new ideas using our massive compute cluster and extensive robotics infrastructure - Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that can handle the complexities of real-world robotics applications 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 innovative 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.
Applied Scientist I
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientists with machine learning background to help build industry-leading Speech and Language technology. Our mission is to provide a delightful experience to Amazon’s customers by pushing the envelope in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning (ML) and Computer Vision (CV). Key job responsibilities Amazon is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientists with machine learning background to help build industry-leading Speech and Language technology. Our mission is to provide a delightful experience to Amazon’s customers by pushing the envelope in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning (ML) and Computer Vision (CV). As part of our AI team in Amazon AWS, you will work alongside internationally recognized experts to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state-of-the-art in human language technology. Your work will directly impact millions of our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will gain hands on experience with Amazon’s heterogeneous speech, text, and structured data sources, and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in spoken language understanding. We are hiring in all areas of human language technology: ASR, MT, NLU, text-to-speech (TTS), and Dialog Management, in addition to Computer Vision. We are also looking for talents with experiences/expertise in building large-scale, high-performing systems. A day in the life 0
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