Autonomous Agent Engineering Intern at Robotics and AI Institute (Zurich, Switzerland)
Robotics and AI Institute· Zurich, Switzerland·
Role details
Job description
Our Mission
Our mission is to solve the most important and fundamental challenges in AI and Robotics to enable future generations of intelligent machines that will help us all live better lives.
What You'll Do
- Build and extend an agentic framework for managing on-robot workflows in various deployment scenarios
- Create an internal benchmark for comprehensive evaluation of the agentic workflow in various robotic tasks
- Work with engineers and researchers to integrate your work with powerful simulation tools and on-robot deployment
- Profile, benchmark, and eliminate performance bottlenecks in resource-constrained Linux environments
What You'll need
- Currently pursuing a Master's (MS) or PhD degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Computational Science & Engineering, or a related field
- Prior software engineering experience (e.g., industry internships, significant open-source contributions, or complex project work)
- AI/ML Foundations: Experience with PyTorch and an understanding of modern AI architectures (LLMs, VLMs, or Reinforcement Learning).
Areas of Special Interest
While strong core software engineering fundamentals in systems programming are required, no specific domain expertise beyond that is necessary. However, if you happen to possess experience in any single one of the following areas, it would be a massive plus and highly relevant to our current projects:
- Sim-to-Real Experience: Experience in deploying ML workflows on physical hardware
- Vision-Language Models (VLMs): Experience integrating multimodal models for robotic perception and task planning.
- Simulators: Experience testing code in simulated environments (e.g., Isaac Sim, MuJoCo).
- Robotic Middleware: Familiarity with ROS2
- Robotic Perception: Familiarity with various scene representations (e.g., Gaussian Splattings, Scene Graphs, World Models, SDFs, etc.), perception frontends (e.g. DINO, SAM, SiGLIP etc.), and approaches to scene understanding.
- Robot Learning: Experience in training ML models for robot action policies, robot perception frontends, and state estimation.
Why work at Robotics and AI Institute
- Culture: Described as a “collaborative research environment” where team members learn from diverse experts and work on cross-functional challenges.
- Locations: Main campus in Cambridge, MA (Kendall Square) and Zurich, Switzerland (Oerlikon robotics & AI hub). Both are vibrant tech ecosystems.
- Benefits: Competitive packages including medical, dental, vision insurance, 401(k) with matching, and 12 weeks parental leave.
- Work style: Roles are on-site (internships and full-time positions specify on-site in Zurich or Cambridge). No explicit remote policy mentioned.
- Engineering culture: Teams span AI, robotics, computing, machine learning, perception, software, mechanical, and electrical engineering – offering exposure to full-stack robot development.