Senior Applied Scientist, Fauna

About the role

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

Basic Qualifications

• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
• Experience in any of the following areas: algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with modeling tools such as R, scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, MxNet, Tensorflow, numpy, scipy etc.
• Experience with large scale distributed systems such as Hadoop, Spark etc.

Additional information

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If the country/region you're applying in isn't listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

Pay and benefits

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave.

USA, NY, New York - 183,800.00 - 248,700.00 USD annually