Postdoctoral Scientist, Amazon Robotics R&D

Job description

from Amazon careers

Amazon is looking for talented Postdoctoral Scientists to join our Amazon Robotics team in Berlin for a one-year full-time research position.

The Amazon Robotics team in Berlin was formed in 2022 and works to automate picking operations in Amazon fulfillment centers by retrofitting existing stations with robotic manipulators.

We are looking for Postdoctoral Scientists to work at the intersection of computer vision and robotic manipulation — supporting innovations that will be deployed to real warehouses at global scale.

Our team develops both the hardware and the software — including the machine learning that makes it work.

We are developing solutions that let robots identify individual items out of millions and interact with the fabric pods where they're stored in clutter.

The core technical challenges include understanding cluttered 3D scenes with hundreds of overlapping items, identifying a specific target among them, and planning manipulation strategies to extract or place it — all in real time, on real hardware.

The solution space is deliberately open-ended. We're looking for researchers who want to push the boundaries of perception and manipulation — and see their work running on robots within months.


Key job responsibilities
In this role you will:
• Work closely with a senior science advisor, collaborate with other scientists and engineers, and be part of Amazon’s vibrant and diverse global science community.
• Publish your innovation in top-tier academic venues and hone your presentation skills
• Be inspired by challenges and opportunities to invent cutting-edge techniques in your area(s) of expertise

Basic Qualifications

- PhD in a relevant field received within 2 years of starting the program
- Proven publication record in computer vision, robotics or other related technical fields
- Experience in item perception and manipulation
- Proficiency in technologies relevant to the subfield
- Speak, write, and read fluently in English

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience of making research work in practice — turning ideas into implementations that run on real systems, not just in simulation or on paper
- Strong programming skills in Python and C++; familiarity with frameworks like PyTorch, ROS, Open3D, or MoveIt
- Experience working with real robot hardware — bridging the sim-to-real gap, dealing with sensor noise, calibration, and physical constraints
- Experience designing experiments and performing rigorous statistical analysis of results
- Ability to make principled tradeoffs between model accuracy, inference speed, and system constraints

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