Member of Technical Staff - Robotics, Frontier AI Robotics

Saved job description

Help us build the software stack underneath Frontier AI & Robotics: the layer between hardware and the AI policies running on it. You’ll work end-to-end across the stack, from bringing up sensors and actuators at the HW/SW boundary, to hardening the multi-process runtime that ties them together, to shipping the framework changes that let the rest of the team move faster.

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.

Requirements: - 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.