Autonomy Engineer Intern - RL for Real-World Drones

Telemetry Today LLC; Zürich; Hybrid; CHF 54,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

Skydio invites a PhD student in robotics or ML to join a research internship focused on reinforcement learning for autonomous drones. You will develop RL-based planning and control, train in realistic 3D environments, and push sim-to-real workflows across perception, mapping, controls, and product teams.

You will collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams to deploy robust policies on production hardware, balancing safety and performance in real-world missions.

Qualifications

• PhD student in robotics, ML, controls or related field.
• Strong fundamentals in RL, control theory, and motion planning; comfort with safety/robustness concepts.
• Proficient in Python (PyTorch/JAX/Ray RLlib) and at least one of C++ or CUDA.
• Hands-on experience with robotics simulation (Isaac Lab/MuJoCo/PyBullet) and sim2real techniques.
• Experience training/deploying policies for navigation or locomotion on real robots or autonomous vehicles.

Responsibilities

• Research and develop RL-based planning and control policies for autonomous drones.
• Train policies in 3D cluttered environments and validate on real hardware.
• Build scalable training loops with domain randomization and safety filters.
• Collaborate with perception, mapping, controls, and product teams to integrate research into field ops.

Skills

RL

Python

C++

PyTorch

MuJoCo

PyBullet

robotics simulation

motion planning

Education

PhD in robotics

Tools

Isaac Lab

CUDA

TensorRT

Job description

Skydio invites a PhD student in robotics or ML to join a research internship focused on reinforcement learning for autonomous drones. You will develop RL-based planning and control, train in realistic 3D environments, and push sim-to-real workflows across perception, mapping, controls, and product teams.

You will collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams to deploy robust policies on production hardware, balancing safety and performance in real-world missions.