PhD Research Intern, Physical AI in Perception
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Job Location:
Foster, CA - USA
Monthly Salary:
Not Disclosed
Posted on:
3 hours ago
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Job Summary
About Zoox
Zoox is transforming mobility with fully autonomous electric vehicles designed from the ground up for a driverless future. Our mission is to make transportation safer more sustainable and accessible to everyone. At Zoox innovation collaboration and a bold vision for the future drive everything we do.
About Our Internship Program
Zooxs internship program offers hands-on experience with cutting-edge technology mentorship from some of the industrys brightest minds and the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to real projects. We seek interns who demonstrate strong academic performance engagement beyond the classroom intellectual curiosity and a genuine interest in Zooxs mission.
Project Overview
This internship is part of the Perception Semantics team focused on advancing on-robot AI systems that enable machines to understand and interact with the physical AI world. Youll work on cutting-edge problems in vision-language-action (VLA) modeling world modeling spatial reasoning and mapping contributing to both research and real-world deployment.
Projects are open-ended and research-driven giving you the opportunity to explore new ideas develop novel approaches and evaluate them in realistic settings. This role is ideal for Ph.D. students interested in pushing the boundaries of computer vision and embodied AI while seeing their work translate into real-world impact.
Qualifications:
- Currently enrolled in the Ph.D program in Computer Science Electrical/Computer Engineering or related field with the specialization in the CV/NLP/ML
- Experience in multi-modal modeling (vision language or planning) with deep understanding of Vision Language Model vision foundation model flow-matching temporal modeling and reinforcement learning techniques
- Strong proficiency in PyTorch and modern transformer-based model design
Bonus Qualifications:
- Publication records in top-tier AI conferences (CVPR ICCV ECCV NeurIPS ICLR ICML etc)
- Prior experience building foundation or end-to-end driving models for autonomous driving or robotics or working deeply on LLM/VLM architectures (e.g. ViT Flamingo BEVFormer RT-2 or GRPO-style policies)
- Knowledge of RLHF/DPO/GRPO trajectory prediction for safety
Requirements:
- Currently working towards a Ph.D in a relevant engineering program
- Good academic standing
- Able to commit to a 12-week internship during one of the following summer 2026 cohorts: May 18th - August 7th OR May 26th - August 14th OR June 15th - September 4th
- At least one previous industry internship co-op or project completed in a relevant area
- Ability to relocate to the Bay Area California (or Boston Massachusetts) for the duration of the internship
- Interns at Zoox may not use any proprietary information they are working on as part of their thesis any published work with their university or to be distributed to anyone outside of Zoox
Required Experience:
Intern
About Company
We’re reinventing personal transportation—making the future safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable for everyone. This is on-demand autonomous ride-hailing.
