Autonomy Engineer Intern — Real-World Drone RL

Skydio; Zürich; On-site; CHF 63,000 - 96,000; Full time

Job summary

Skydio, a leading drone company, invites PhD students to join an internship focusing on reinforcement learning for autonomous flight. You will work with perception, mapping, and controls teams to deploy policies on real hardware and edge compute.

You will prototype in simulation, flight test on production aircraft, and contribute to safe, robust autonomy. Proficiency in Python with PyTorch/JAX, plus C++ or CUDA, and robotics simulators like MuJoCo or PyBullet is expected.

Qualifications

• Strong fundamentals in RL, control theory, and motion planning.
• Proficiency in Python (PyTorch/JAX) and C++ or CUDA.
• Hands-on robotics simulation experience (Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, PyBullet).
• Experience training/deploying policies for navigation or locomotion on real robots.

Responsibilities

• Train policies for navigation in cluttered 3D scenes.
• Develop RL-augmented planning with trajectory optimization.
• Build scalable datasets and training loops; validate on real drones weekly.
• Learn assistive policies for human-in-the-loop control.
• Explore decentralized coordination for multi-agent missions.

Skills

RL fundamentals

Python

C++

Robotics sim

Policy learning

Education

PhD candidate in Robotics

Tools

Isaac Lab

MuJoCo

PyBullet

TensorRT

Job description

Skydio, a leading drone company, invites PhD students to join an internship focusing on reinforcement learning for autonomous flight. You will work with perception, mapping, and controls teams to deploy policies on real hardware and edge compute.

You will prototype in simulation, flight test on production aircraft, and contribute to safe, robust autonomy. Proficiency in Python with PyTorch/JAX, plus C++ or CUDA, and robotics simulators like MuJoCo or PyBullet is expected.