Proception — Careers — 🎓 Research Intern – Robot Learning & Manipulation (MS/PhD, 6–12 months)
🎓 Research Intern – Robot Learning & Manipulation (MS/PhD, 6–12 months)
Mountain View, CA (On-Site)/Internship
About the role
Join our research team to work on learning-based control and perception for real-world robot manipulation. You'll train and evaluate manipulation policies, build the data and evaluation infrastructure behind them, and run experiments that go all the way from an idea to a robot doing something new. We care more about your ability to train models that work than about any particular robot, task, or sensor you've used before.
Requirements
- 01 Currently enrolled in an MS or PhD program in Robotics, Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field
- 02 Strong foundation in training neural networks — you can take a model from idea to a working, debugged result
- 03 Strong foundation in imitation learning or reinforcement learning
- 04 Proficiency in Python and at least one deep learning framework (PyTorch, JAX)
- 05 Experience with vision-based policy learning — diffusion policies, 3D policies, vision-language-action models, video action models
- 06 (+) Experience with robot simulators (e.g., MuJoCo, Isaac Gym/Lab)
- 07 (+) Hands-on experience with robot hardware, real-world data collection, or sim2real adaptation
- 08 (+) Familiarity with contact-rich or dexterous manipulation, or tactile sensing
- 09 (+) Publications or preprints at robotics or ML venues (CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR)
Details & responsibilities
- 01 Design, train, and evaluate manipulation policies on real hardware
- 02 Run focused research experiments end-to-end — form a hypothesis, build the ablation, and draw a clear conclusion from noisy real-world results
- 03 Integrate multimodal sensor streams (RGB, depth, proprioception, tactile) into policy architectures
- 04 Contribute to data collection tools and replay infrastructure for learning from human demonstrations
- 05 Work closely with hardware, AI, and perception engineers to close the loop from sensing to control
Compensation & benefits
- 01 Paid internship with competitive compensation
- 02 Work on cutting-edge problems in robot learning and manipulation
- 03 Mentorship from researchers and engineers working at the frontier of embodied intelligence
- 04 Access to real robot hardware and large-scale robot datasets
- 05 Opportunity to publish or contribute to high-impact research alongside product-driven development
Interested in this role? Applying takes a few minutes — you'll need an account to submit.