Member of Technical Staff - Robotics, Frontier AI Robotics
Amazon is hiring a Member of Technical Staff - Robotics, Frontier AI Robotics in San Francisco, United States. Level rates it ; you can apply on Amazon.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this role: the job is building AI systems.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include JAX.
- Level classifies it as a lead role.
- Level lists 20,000+ other open roles at Amazon.
AI in this role
This is a generalist role with a real systems edge. We need someone equally at home down at the sensor and OS boundary (drivers, IPC, real-time behavior, profiling) and up in robotics application code (most of it Python). You’ll spend stretches of a few days to a few weeks each on things like bringing up a new sensor at the protocol layer, chasing a flaky USB camera at the kernel boundary, generalizing the camera stack, cutting perception latency, porting code onto edge compute, or chasing a DDS/ROS 2 performance regression.
You’ll work with sharp, motivated engineers across hardware, ML research, controls, and ops on continuously changing problems at the frontier of AI and robotics. The role rewards engineers who communicate clearly, invest in cross-team relationships, and ship.
Key job responsibilities
- Bring up and integrate sensors, actuators, and edge compute across diverse robotics hardware platforms.
- Build and improve the multi-process Python and ROS 2 runtime: process management, IPC, observability, lifecycle.
- Diagnose and fix bottlenecks across the stack: middleware performance (DDS, ROS 2), perception pipeline latency, edge inference throughput, system-level resource contention.
- Generalize one-off solutions into reusable infrastructure (camera stacks, telemetry pipelines, edge deployment tooling) that scales across hardware platforms and use cases.
- Port code onto the constrained edge-compute platforms our robots run. Make it work, then make it work well.
- Identify gaps in the team’s velocity, whether that’s a missing piece of infrastructure or a fragile sensor that nobody has time to fix, and close them.
- Make proper tradeoffs between prototyping and production software.
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 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.
Basic qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
- 5+ years of software development experience
- Experience with C++/Python interop or other hybrid-language stacks.
- Experience as a tech lead, mentor, or technical owner of an engineering team or significant component. Experience designing and shipping software systems that run across distributed processes, edge devices, or real-time constraints.
- Experience working closely with hardware, ML, or controls teams as the software counterpart.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with low-level driver work and sensor bring-up across protocols (I2C, SPI, USB, MIPI, CAN).
- Experience optimizing data plane performance: DDS tuning, kernel networking, shared memory IPC, real-time scheduling.
- Experience with ROS 2 or other robotics middleware in production.
- Experience deploying ML inference at the edge under latency and memory constraints.
- Experience with multi-process Python lifecycles and writing performant Python (asyncio, multiprocessing, NumPy/JAX vectorization, GIL-aware design).
- Web application or full-stack web experience is a bonus.
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.
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How we rate this
Member of Technical Staff - Robotics, Frontier AI Robotics at Amazon rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- What's a project where you used JAX hands-on?
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
- Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: JAX. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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