Fauna Robotics is building capable, safe, and delightful robots for everyday life, and understanding where it is, and what's around it, is fundamental to everything a robot does. A robot that lives alongside people must build and maintain a map of its environment, plan paths through cluttered and changing spaces, and do so reliably whether it's navigating a hallway for the hundredth time or entering a room it has never seen. We are hiring a Principal Applied Scientist to serve as a technical authority on how our robots understand and move through the world. You will design, prototype, and ship the core algorithms that give the robot spatial intelligence - from real-time SLAM and scene understanding to motion planning and autonomous navigation. You will set the mapping and navigation architecture that other engineers build on, shape sensor and compute decisions across robot generations, mentor the engineers and scientists working on spatial perception, and be the person teams come to when the robot is lost. Key job responsibilities - Set the long-range science roadmap and technical architecture for the robot's mapping, localization, and navigation stack, and serve as Fauna's primary technical authority on spatial intelligence - Design and implement real-time visual-inertial and/or lidar-based SLAM systems that build, update, and maintain persistent maps of home and indoor environments - Develop robust localization algorithms that allow the robot to determine its precise pose in previously mapped spaces, handling environmental changes such as moved furniture, lighting variation, and dynamic occupants - Build navigation and motion planning systems that produce safe, efficient, and natural-looking trajectories through cluttered, dynamic human spaces - Architect semantic mapping capabilities that go beyond geometry — enabling the robot to understand rooms, objects, surfaces, and traversable space at a level that supports higher-level task planning - Drive sensor selection and placement decisions for depth cameras, lidar, IMUs, and encoders in collaboration with mechanical, electrical, and industrial design teams, backed by your own benchmarking and analysis - Design the robot-specific data collection, benchmarking, and evaluation methods to validate mapping accuracy, localization robustness, and navigation safety across diverse real-world environments - Develop strategies for graceful degradation and recovery — ensuring the robot behaves safely when localization is uncertain, maps are incomplete, or sensors are occluded - Present mapping and navigation science and its tradeoffs to senior leadership and partner teams - Mentor scientists and engineers, raising the scientific bar for spatial perception across the organization through design reviews, code reviews, and hiring About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won't arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We're changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We're building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful. At Fauna, you'll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, navigate, and interact with people in natural environments. It's an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we're interested in hearing from you.
