Sr. Applied Scientist, Fauna Robotics

Amazon Amazon · Big Tech · Sunnyvale, CA · Applied Science

This role focuses on researching and building advanced SLAM and World Reconstruction algorithms for robots to enable them to understand their environment and perform tasks. It involves developing state estimation, pose estimation, mapping, and reconstruction algorithms, building evaluation frameworks, and collaborating with other robotics teams.

What you'd actually do

  1. Develop and implement robust robot state estimation, pose estimation, mapping, and reconstruction algorithms.
  2. Build simulation-based and on-robot evaluation frameworks with comprehensive benchmarks and metrics for systematic evaluation of our spatial intelligence stack.
  3. Lead scientific and technical projects across the spatial intelligence team.
  4. Collaborate with navigation, manipulation, and other teams to ensure seamless integration of localization, tracking, and mapping capabilities.
  5. Mentor junior scientists and engineers to solve real-world robotics problems.

Skills

Required

  • PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
  • Experience leading technical initiatives and key deliverables
  • 6+ years of building Localization and Mapping algorithms experience.
  • Strong publication record at major Robotics/ML/AI conferences (e.g., RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR)
  • Experience programming in Python, C++,or related language

Nice to have

  • Hands-on experience with modern solutions in the field of Localization, Mapping, and reconstruction such as Gaussian Splatting, Foundation Models (e.g. VGGT), etc.
  • History of impactful first-author publications at major journals or conferences
  • Experience bridging research with practical engineering implementation in robotics systems

What the JD emphasized

  • building Localization and Mapping algorithms experience
  • Strong publication record at major Robotics/ML/AI conferences
  • Experience bridging research with practical engineering implementation in robotics systems

Other signals

  • robotics localization
  • SLAM
  • geometric reconstruction
  • state estimation
  • spatial intelligence