PhD Research Intern, Autonomous Systems and Physical AI Research - 2027

NVIDIA Corporation; Zürich; On-site; CHF 20,000 - 33,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA invites outstanding Research Interns to contribute to autonomous vehicles, robotics and physical AI in the ASPIRE group. You will design and implement cutting-edge techniques, perform original research and publish results while collaborating with researchers across the company.

The role requires you to be pursuing a PhD in Robotics, Computer Science or related field, with strong publication record, excellent Python and C++ skills, and experience with PyTorch.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD in robotics, computer science, or related field.
• Strong publication record in leading conferences/journals.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement cutting-edge techniques for autonomous vehicles, robotics, and physical AI.
• Conduct original research and publish results.
• Collaborate with research colleagues, internal product teams, and external researchers.
• Transfer technology to relevant product groups.

Skills

Research experience

Publications

Communication skills

Education

PhD student in Robotics/CS/CE or related field

Tools

Python

C++

CUDA

PyTorch

Git

Job description

We are recruiting outstanding Research Interns to work on autonomous vehicles, robotics, and physical AI! Intelligent machines that can perceive, reason, and safely interact with people and the physical world are rapidly becoming a reality. Self-driving cars, autonomous delivery and construction vehicles, mobile manipulators, and other robotic systems are moving closer to widespread deployment. However, fundamental research challenges remain before these systems can operate safely, reliably, and autonomously in complex, unfamiliar environments. For example, how can we: Develop new training paradigms that use perception and interaction to train autonomous vehicle and robot policies in closed loop? Equip autonomous systems with online and offline assurances that meet the requirements of safety-critical applications? Enable vehicles and robots to navigate across new environments, tasks, and embodiments? Build systems that reason under uncertainty and interact safely and naturally with people and other agents? These are some of the exciting questions being explored by NVIDIA’s Autonomous Systems and Physical AI Research (ASPIRE) group. Our diverse, interdisciplinary team conducts foundational research spanning foundation model design, embodied reasoning, safety, closed-loop training and evaluation, and agentic workflows for Physical AI development. We also investigate related areas including decision-making under uncertainty, deep learning, reinforcement learning, simulation, and the verification and validation of safety-critical AI systems. Our focus is on fundamental research, and lab members are encouraged to publish their work and open-source their code. NVIDIA is known for its collaborative culture, and our researchers work closely with experts across the company in autonomous vehicles, robotics, perception, simulation, and machine learning. This creates opportunities to influence real-world products while retaining the freedom and bandwidth to conduct groundbreaking, publishable research.

What you’ll be doing:

• Designing and implementing cutting-edge techniques for autonomous vehicles, robotics, and physical AI.
• Conducting original research and publishing your results.
• Collaborating with research colleagues, internal product teams, and external researchers.
• Transferring technology you’ve developed to relevant product groups.

What we need to see:

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Relevant research experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, embodied AI, or autonomous systems.
• Strong knowledge of the theory and practice of vehicle or robot autonomy—or expertise in a related area, with a strong interest in applying your work to autonomous systems.
• A track record of research excellence, demonstrated through publications at leading conferences and journals—such as RSS, ICRA, CoRL, IJRR, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, TAC, etc.—and through other research artifacts such as open-source software.
• Exceptional Python programming skills; experience with C++ and parallel programming, such as CUDA, is a plus.
• Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills are required, along with the ability to thrive in a dynamic, research-focused team.

Are you intellectually curious, collaborative, and motivated to solve complex problems at the intersection of AI and the physical world? If so, you may be a great fit for NVIDIA. NVIDIA pioneered accelerated computing. Today, our AI infrastructure powers global intelligence, transforming every industry. Learn more about NVIDIA.