Senior Robotics SDE III, Amazon Robotics - Vulcan

Our team in Amazon Robotics builds robotic systems that perform manipulation tasks safely and reliably in complex, unstructured environments — at Amazon scale. Our scientists and engineers push the boundaries of robotic manipulation to handle enormous object diversity, bringing deep expertise across planning, control, perception, and machine learning. We learn from real-world data at a scale that few teams in robotics can access.

We are seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer to join the Vulcan program as part of our Motion Behaviors team. You will work alongside experienced roboticists to develop and deploy contact-rich manipulation at speeds and scale not seen anywhere else in the world. You will drive the creation of new tools and pipelines to develop, deploy, and understand the performance of complex item manipulation policies in the messy real world of Amazon global operations. This role sits at the intersection of robotics, ML systems, and production engineering — ideal for someone who wants to build infrastructure that makes robots better every day.

Key job responsibilities
- Design and build software infrastructure for motion behavior execution, including controller interfaces, behavior configuration, and runtime introspection.
- Improve the maintainability and extensibility of the behavior stack to allow for faster development and testing.
- Build observability and debugging tools for production robot behaviors, including structured traces, failure signatures, and behavior-level metrics.
- Develop replay, regression, and evaluation infrastructure for comparing behavior versions and validating changes before production rollout.
- Define and own the safe deployment strategy for behavior changes, including versioning, feature flags, A/B testing, and automated experiment reporting.
- Build the runtime integration layer for learned behavior components, including policy wrappers, inference monitoring, safety envelopes, and fallback rationale.
- Build supportive ML training and deployment pipelines that scale as the team expands its learned behavior development.
- Set software engineering standards for the team — establishing best practices and mentoring team on testing, code quality, system reliability, and production readiness.
- Collaborate closely with applied scientists and engineers to turn algorithms and prototypes into reliable, production-ready robotic behavior capabilities.

A day in the life
Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include:
1. Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage
2. Maternity and Parental Leave Options
3. Paid Time Off (PTO)
4. 401(k) Plan

If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply!

Basic Qualifications

- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
- Strong proficiency in C++ and Python
- Experience building production-quality systems for robotics, autonomy, controls, or other complex real-time/near-real-time domains
- Experience with production deployment, observability, and operational excellence for systems that run continuously

Preferred Qualifications

- 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
- Experience with ML training pipelines, model deployment, or inference infrastructure
- Experience with data replay, simulation, and A/B testing
- Familiarity with real-time control systems, robotic middleware, and/or motion planning algorithms
- Experience with state machines, behavior trees, or autonomous system runtimes

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

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.

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. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, WA, Seattle - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually