PhD Research Intern: VLA Robotics & Perception

Boston Dynamics, Inc.; Waltham (MA); On-site; USD 41,000 - 96,000; Part time

Job summary

Boston Dynamics, Inc. is seeking PhD-level interns to join the Atlas VLA Research Team. You will lead research projects, develop experiments, and deploy ideas directly onto Atlas hardware, bridging lab concepts with real-world robotic performance.

The role focuses on perception, reasoning, and dexterous action, with collaboration across multiple teams. The hourly pay range is $30–$70, reflecting experience and internal policies.

Qualifications

• PhD-level intern (preferred) or research-heavy Master’s in CS/Robotics/ML.
• Expertise in training and deploying imitation learning models for robotics.
• Experience with large-scale data and distributed training workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead high-stakes research projects establishing hypotheses and experiments for VLA/WAM performance.
• Prototype data collection, mixing, grading schemes and training recipes for Atlas deployment.
• Collaborate across teams to integrate learned policies with robot control.

Skills

Imitation learning for robotics

Large-scale cluster training

Experiment design

Education

PhD student in CS/Robotics/ML

Tools

Kubernetes

SLURM

Distributed GPU training

Job description

Boston Dynamics, Inc. is seeking PhD-level interns to join the Atlas VLA Research Team. You will lead research projects, develop experiments, and deploy ideas directly onto Atlas hardware, bridging lab concepts with real-world robotic performance.

The role focuses on perception, reasoning, and dexterous action, with collaboration across multiple teams. The hourly pay range is $30–$70, reflecting experience and internal policies.