Autonomous Agent Engineering Intern

Robotics and AI Institute; Zürich; On-site; CHF 28,000 - 42,000; Full time

Job summary

Robotics and AI Institute in Zürich invites Master’s or PhD students to join a full-time, six-month internship to build agentic infrastructure for robot autonomy and to work alongside researchers and engineers.

You will develop an agentic framework, benchmarks, integrate with simulation tools, and optimize in resource-constrained Linux environments, pushing the future of robotics and learning-based systems.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Master's (MS) or PhD degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Computational Science & Engineering, or a related field
• Prior software engineering experience through internships or significant open-source contributions
• Experience with PyTorch and understanding of modern AI architectures (LLMs, VLMs, RL)

Responsibilities

• 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

Skills

Software engineering

PyTorch

AI architectures

Robotics

Education

Master's degree

PhD

Tools

ROS2

Isaac Sim

MuJoCo

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.

We are looking for Master's and PhD students to work full-time for an extended period (~6 months) in an invigorating environment where researchers and engineers are building the future of robotics and learning-based systems. Strong candidates will bring exceptional talent with solid fundamentals in agents and system design. Your project will focus on developing agentic infrastructure and systems for robot autonomy.

If you have a passion for robots and a desire to be part of the advancement of robot capabilities and usefulness, you will want to join us!

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.

We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.