---
title: 'Optical Sensing Intern - Robot Perception at Rhoda AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/optical-sensing-intern-robot-perception-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-r1qxt3g84rrg'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-11'
---

# Optical Sensing Intern - Robot Perception at Rhoda AI

- **Company:** Rhoda AI
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Employment:** internship
- **Posted:** 2026-11-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rhoda-ai/df2aa2a4-ca56-4fa6-b106-89a7fc6a9bb4

## Job description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality. Level: Internship or co-op, MS students; 4–6 months duration - starting as soon as possible You’ll help decide how our robots see. Our robots work around people in real warehouses, and every sensor has conditions that defeat it: bright sunlight, shiny floors, glass, dust, heat. Your experiments will tell us which settings to ship, where each sensor breaks and why, and what we should do about it. You’ll work directly with our perception and hardware engineers, and your findings go straight into sensor choices, settings and the requirements our detection algorithms are built against. This is a hands-on internship for someone who understands optical physics and wants to see their work running on real robots.

## What You’ll Do

- Design experiments that answer real engineering questions, such as which sensor settings work best for each job, and whether a sensor still sees a person in direct sunlight
- Explain why a sensor fails, from the physics up: ambient light, dynamic range, multipath, reflectance, angle of incidence, heat
- Propose and test what to do about each failure: a different setting, a filter, a mounting change, or a check the software can run
- Build the scenes, targets and scenarios that reproduce real-world conditions in the lab, and in the field when the lab isn’t enough
- Use sensor SDKs and firmware to sweep and tune settings such as exposure, gain, frame rate, range modes and filtering
- Write Python to process images and point clouds and turn raw data into clear numbers: range, accuracy, noise, dropout
- Present findings and recommendations to engineers who will act on them

## What We’re Looking For

- Pursuing an MS in Optics, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Computer Vision or Robotics, with research or lab experience designing experiments
- Strong grasp of optical sensing physics: image formation, noise, dynamic range, time-of-flight and LiDAR principles
- Hands-on with cameras, LiDAR, time-of-flight or other optical sensors in a lab or on a robot
- Comfortable with sensor SDKs, drivers and configuration
- Python for numerical analysis and image or point-cloud processing (NumPy, OpenCV, Open3D or similar)
- Curiosity to dig past “it doesn’t work” to the cause, and creativity in finding fixes
- Explains results clearly, in writing and with plots, to people outside your specialty

## Nice to Have

- Camera or sensor calibration
- Thermal or infrared imaging
- Optical modeling or sensor simulation
- ROS 2 and recorded-data tools

## About Rhoda AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Rhoda AI builds robot foundation models that learn from internet-scale video to enable manipulation-capable robots to generalize in real-world industrial environments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed + Series A; $680M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, CA, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jagdeep Singh (CEO), Eric Chan (Chief Scientist), Changan Chen (Chief Research Officer), Andrew Wooten, Gordon Wetzstein (Scientific Advisor) [rhoda.ai/team](https://www.rhoda.ai/team)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Hardware
- **Target customers**: B2B – industrial enterprises in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce
- **Mission/purpose**: “Building at the frontier of embodied intelligence” and “Designing intelligence for the real world” – deploying general-purpose robot foundation models that adapt to the variability of commercial and industrial environments. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/) | [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)

## Products & Services
- **Rhoda Robot Platform (Hardware + Software)**: A turnkey robotic system with custom actuators (25kg rated, 40kg peak payload), safety-rated vision, wheel-base, and brakes in every actuator. The platform runs the **Direct Video Action** model, which pre-trains on over a million real-world videos and post-trains on task-specific robot data. Long-context windows enable single-shot learning from human demonstrations without retraining. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **FutureVision Intelligence Layer**: A proprietary architecture that handles real-world industrial tasks autonomously by generalizing beyond conventional VLA pipelines. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **Deployment Services**: End-to-end solutions for tasks such as returns processing, bearing decanting, container breakdown, and material transport in logistics and e-commerce facilities. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding **$680M** – Seed round $67.4M (April 2024), Series A $162.6M (April 2025), and Series A $450M (March 2026) with 4 investors. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not individually named in available sources; partners include customers in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount growth of **+20% monthly** (LinkedIn reports 55 employees; Built In reports 73 employees – conflicting data). Talent sourced from companies like QuantumScape, Flexiv Robotics, Scale AI, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, and Stanford University. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai) | [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Direct Video Action architecture** with web-scale video pre-training gives a strong prior on motion, physics, and dynamics, enabling generalization beyond lab settings.
- **Custom high-performance actuators** (25kg rated, 40kg peak) with safety-rated brakes and vision – designed for 3+ years of continuous operation at rated payload.
- **Long-context in-context learning** allows the robot to perform tasks single-shot from human demonstrations without retraining.
- **Turnkey industrial deployments** that handle ambiguity and variability (e.g., debris, transparent bags, heavy boxes) – tasks customers initially believed could not be automated. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling robot intelligence through a pre-training/post-training paradigm, moving from controlled labs to reliable production environments.
- Expanding commercial deployments across automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce verticals.
- Pursuing a path to **physical AGI** by combining foundation models with custom hardware for real-world adaptability. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Building at the frontier of embodied intelligence” – emphasis on hard problems, first-principles thinking, and category-defining systems. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Work policy**: Hybrid workspace (employees combine remote and on-site work), with offices in Mountain View and Palo Alto, CA. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Engineering culture**: Strong research focus (Chief Research Officer, Chief Scientist, many research engineers/scientists). Recent job postings include Research Scientist, Robot Perception Engineer, Mechanical Engineer, Fullstack Engineer, and Product Manager. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly listed, but the company is well-funded ($680M) and at an early stage (founded 2024), offering significant growth opportunity and impact.

## Sources
1. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/) – Company website (product, technology, commercial applications)
2. [rhoda.ai/careers](https://www.rhoda.ai/careers) – Careers page
3. [rhoda.ai/team](https://www.rhoda.ai/team) – Leadership team and co-founders
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai) – Built In profile (employee count, offices, job listings, hybrid policy)
5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai) – LinkedIn company page (funding, headcount, executive list, talent sources)

## Other roles at Rhoda AI

- [Software QA Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/software-qa-engineer-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-cqw0tyxmjaxa) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior System Safety Engineer - Perception](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-system-safety-engineer-perception-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-4wzr6tw3r49a) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior/Staff TPM - Hardware](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-tpm-hardware-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-1gs3k8kf579p) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior TPM - Software & Controls](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-tpm-software-controls-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-y3vxhv09ttb9) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior Inference Optimization ML Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-inference-optimization-ml-engineer-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-s9kmbmmt2gmk) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior / Staff Technical Program Manager, AI Research](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-technical-program-manager-ai-research-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-vwmnc9zskvbs) — Mountain View, CA
- [Marketing Communications Senior Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-communications-senior-associate-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-vmkhppnjbaa4) — Mountain View, CA
- [Software Engineer, Rhoda Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-rhoda-platform-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-118z5qm9f5q0) — Mountain View, CA
- [Software Engineer Intern, Rhoda Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-intern-rhoda-platform-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-3s3s0rkqmbkw) — Mountain View, CA
- [Software Engineer Intern, Inference](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-intern-inference-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-0yz1xmmcxnsq) — Mountain View, CA