Autonomy Software Engineering Intern - World Modeling

Persona AI; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 22,000 - 47,000; Full time

Job summary

Persona AI in Houston, TX is seeking an Autonomy Software Engineering Intern to advance the world modeling layer of our autonomy stack. You will curate real-world industrial video data, fine-tune models, and develop both data pipelines and synthetic data generation for robust world models.

You will collaborate with the autonomy team including ML, perception, and simulation engineers, reporting to the Behavior Coordination Lead. This paid internship is onsite in Houston for Fall 2026.

Qualifications

• Pursuing BS/MS/PhD in Robotics, CS, ML, EE or related field; recent graduates welcome.
• Hands-on experience with training, fine-tuning, or evaluating PyTorch models.
• Strong Python skills; capable of data processing, training loops, evaluation harnesses.
• Familiar with vision-language, large language models, or video understanding models.
• Experience building data pipelines: ingestion, filtering, labeling, deduplication, train/val/test splits.
• Proficient in Linux, Git, Docker, and cloud-based GPU infrastructure.
• Self-directed, able to make steady progress on an open-ended research problem with weekly check-ins.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement autonomy and behavior coordination algorithms for an industrial humanoid platform.
• Collaborate with manipulation, locomotion, and perception engineers to integrate robot skills into autonomous behaviors.
• Implement data curation pipelines to convert real-world footage into training data.
• Develop synthetic data generation pipelines for post-training world models.
• Design and implement pipelines for autonomous behavior evaluation, benchmarking, and regression testing.
• Turn raw industrial video footage into structured, high-quality training data.
• Design and evaluate reasoning benchmarks grounding language queries in shipyard scenes.

Skills

PyTorch

Python

Data pipelines

Vision-language models

Large language models

Video understanding

Linux

Git

Docker

Cloud GPUs

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Robotics/CS/ML/EE

Tools

Docker

Git

NVIDIA Cosmos

Job description

Persona AI in Houston, TX is seeking an Autonomy Software Engineering Intern to advance the world modeling layer of our autonomy stack. You will curate real-world industrial video data, fine-tune models, and develop both data pipelines and synthetic data generation for robust world models.

You will collaborate with the autonomy team including ML, perception, and simulation engineers, reporting to the Behavior Coordination Lead. This paid internship is onsite in Houston for Fall 2026.