Autonomy Software Engineering Internship, 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

Job Title: Autonomy Software Engineering Intern, World Modeling

Department: Robotics Software Engineering

Employment Type: Internship, Fall 2026

FLSA: Exempt

Location: Houston, TX – Onsite

Persona AI is developing and commercializing rugged, multi-purpose humanoid robots that perform real work. Persona's founding team has a decades-long history in humanoid robotics, bionics, and product development delivering robust hardware that has touched the stars, worked miles below the surface of the ocean, and even roamed Disney Parks. Our mission is focused squarely on shipping beautiful, reliable products at massive scale, while building a customer-focused team to achieve these aims.

We're looking for an Autonomy Software Engineering Intern to help build the world modeling layer of our autonomy stack. You will work hands‑on with NVIDIA Cosmos3, curating real-world industrial video data from our customer facilities and fine‑tuning models to give our humanoid robots a grounded understanding of the environments they operate in.

This is a paid summer internship based in Houston, TX. You will report to the Behavior Coordination Lead and work directly with the autonomy team alongside our machine learning, perception, and simulation engineers.

Your Role

• Design and implement autonomy and behavior coordination algorithms for an industrial humanoid platform
• Work with manipulation, locomotion, and perception engineers to integrate robot skills into autonomous robot behaviors
• Implement data curation pipelines that enable our robots to understand a variety of real-world industrial tasks.
• Develop synthetic data generation pipelines for post-training of humanoid world models
• Design and implement pipelines for autonomous behavior evaluation, benchmarking, and regression testing
• Turn raw industrial video footage (shipyards, steel fabrication, welding cells) into structured, high-quality training data.
• Design and evaluate reasoning benchmarks that measure how well a fine‑tuned world model grounds language queries in real shipyard and fabrication-plant scenes.

We're Looking For

• Currently pursuing a BS, MS, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or a related field; recent graduates are also welcome.
• Hands‑on experience training, fine‑tuning, or evaluating modern deep learning models in PyTorch.
• Strong Python skills; comfortable writing data processing scripts, training loops, and evaluation harnesses.
• Working familiarity with at least one vision-language model, large language model, or video understanding model.
• Practical experience building data pipelines: ingestion, filtering, labeling workflows, deduplication, train/val/test splits.
• Comfortable working in Linux environments with Git, containers (Docker), and cloud GPU infrastructure.
• Self-directed and able to make steady progress on an open-ended research problem with weekly check-ins rather than daily direction.

Preferred Or Bonus Qualifications

• Direct experience with NVIDIA Cosmos or comparable world foundation models.
• Exposure to NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Omniverse, or OpenUSD for synthetic data generation and scene variability.
• Familiarity with humanoid or mobile-manipulator robotics, ROS/ROS 2, and the broader autonomy stack.
• Experience with motion capture data, egocentric video capture, or first-person dataset construction.
• Exposure to behavior trees, task and motion planning, or LLM-driven planning architectures.
• Familiarity with NVIDIA Isaac Lab, NIM microservices, or the Hugging Face training ecosystem.
• Prior internship, research, or open-source work on physical AI, embodied reasoning, or robot learning.

Why join Persona AI?

• You'll work on technology that redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.
• Work alongside passionate teammates who value diversity, creativity, and continuous learning.
• Enjoy full access to advanced prototyping tools, labs, and the freedom to experiment and innovate.
• We offer competitive intern compensation, a flexible work environment, and meaningful technical mentorship.

Persona AI embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.