PhD Research Intern — Learned End-to-End Driving and Actuation

Zendar; Berkeley (CA); On-site; USD 97,000 - 132,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

On-site in Berkeley

Mentorship by tech lead

Access to multi-GPU cluster

Daily catered lunches

Job summary

Zendar is seeking a final-year PhD student for a Research Intern role focused on learned planning and actuation, on-site in Berkeley, CA. You will own a research direction for the production planner using real fleet data and present results to guide future development and potential full-time positions.

Ideal candidates have first-author work in motion forecasting or planning and are proficient in Python and PyTorch.

Qualifications

• Final-year PhD student in CS/EE/Robotics, available for on-site Berkeley internship.
• First-author work in motion forecasting or planning, or related sequential decision-making.
• Solid ML pipeline knowledge with real sensor data experience.
• Strong communication and collaboration; team-based research environment.

Responsibilities

• Own a research direction on the production planner using real fleet data.
• Present results to researchers and decision-makers for potential full-time hire.
• Test and evaluate actuation and planning pipelines, both offline and on-vehicle.
• Contribute to publication-friendly, reproducible research practices.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Research

Data analysis

Education

PhD student

Job description

Most autonomy stacks are built around a single major sensor, usually the camera, with every other sensor secondary. Zendar took a different path: an early-fusion camera and radar perception system, in bird's-eye view and in 3D, in which each sensor plays a major role, trained data-efficiently on a multi-million-sample labelled dataset we collected ourselves. We own the whole pipeline, sensor setup and calibration, learned perception, lane estimation and map integration, and that vertical integration lets us move fast on hard problems. We are now turning to what comes after perception: action and actuation, using the full pipeline to actuate autonomously in the real world, for autonomous vehicles and robotics, in a learned, end-to-end way. A learned motion planner drives on that stack today; this role is about the research that takes it further.

The Perception and Machine Learning Team is looking for a final-year PhD student to join us as a Research Intern on learned planning and actuation, on-site in Berkeley, CA. This internship offers an opportunity for both the intern and the team to assess mutual fit for a potential full-time research position.

The Role

You will own one research direction on the production planner, working with the researchers who ship it, on real fleet data, and present your results to the people who decide what ships. What a successful planner means to us, and what we will measure you against:

• Understands what is missing: finds the mechanism behind a driving planner's failures and shows which gap matters before changing anything.
• Handles the long tail, never gets stuck and knows how to get itself unstuck: agile, it commits, launches, re-plans and recovers on its own.
• Collision- and comfort-aware, and generalizes across structured environments (roads, lanes, intersections) and unstructured ones (lots, yards, sites, robotics settings).
• Knows how to test and evaluate actuation and planning pipelines: open-loop, closed-loop and on-vehicle, with metrics that predict road behavior.
• Production quality, not a proof of concept: tested code, reproducible results, behavior that holds across checkpoints and scenes. This is our standard and our measure of success.

Potential Projects

• Generative planning with flow matching: a flow-matching or diffusion policy over ego trajectories with few-step inference and explicit constraint guidance in the sampler.
• The long tail: data balancing and hard-case mining, counterfactual and generative scenario synthesis, or reasoning-augmented planners.
• Closed-loop evaluation and training that matches our sensors: counterfactual observations faithful to radar and camera features, so closed-loop metrics predict road behaviour.
• Post-training with reinforcement learning: rule-reward or closed-loop fine-tuning, parallel imitation + RL—and whether the gain survives a real sensor stack and a safety layer.
• Your own idea: tokenized planning with learned scoring, a world model as the planner's critic, uncertainty-aware ranking, self-play traffic.

Every change is evaluated closed-loop and open-loop against the current planner, failures examined and not just counted, and results presented to the team's leads. We support publication of non-proprietary findings.

What We Look For

• Final-year PhD student (or within 12 months of defending) in computer science, electrical engineering, robotics or a related field, available for an on-site internship in Berkeley.
• First-author work in motion forecasting or planning, generative models for sequential decision making (diffusion, flow matching), reinforcement or imitation learning for control, or closed-loop simulation and evaluation.
• Python and PyTorch: you can read a large model file, change the loss, and prove it did what you intended; a solid grasp of the ML pipeline end to end, including real sensor data and its problems.
• Communication, teamwork and brainstorming matter to us as much as the technical bar: work in the open, take and give review well, bring half-formed ideas to the whiteboard early. Research here is a team sport.

Bonus Points

• Publications at CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICRA, CoRL or RSS on end-to-end driving, trajectory generation, world models or RL post-training.
• Results on a closed-loop benchmark (Bench2Drive, NAVSIM v2, Waymo Sim Agents, nuPlan), and an opinion on where those benchmarks mislead.
• Radar, lidar or multi-sensor BEV perception; multi-day GPU-cluster training kept honest (checkpoint variance, clean ablations); vision-language-action models or constraint-guided sampling.

What We Offer

• A research problem with a direct line to the product, and a defined path to a full-time research position on the team.
• A dedicated multi-GPU cluster allocation and access to Zendar's fleet data, labels and closed-loop evaluation pipeline from day one; mentorship by the team's technical lead and a weekly research review with its research leads.
• 40 hours/week internship position for 3-6 months, flexible start date
• Compensation of $55.00/hr
• A young, venture-backed company in an emerging market, with a multidisciplinary team of experts in hardware, signal processing and machine learning.
• Daily catered lunches and a fully stocked fridge.

Zendar is committed to creating a diverse environment where talented people come to do their best work. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
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