Research Intern - Real-Time Scene Understanding & Planning

Didi Labs; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 52,000 - 74,000; Full time

Job summary

Didi Autonomous Driving in San Jose, CA is seeking a Research Intern to advance scene understanding and planning for autonomous vehicles. You will tackle hard, open problems with frontier research methods, from problem definition to validated solution, with potential to publish results.

You will work under the team lead, collaborating with perception, prediction, planning, and mapping groups. The internship emphasizes real-world impact and product-ready prototypes.

Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in an M.S. or Ph.D. program in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field, for the full duration of the internship.
• Available for a full-time onsite internship of 3–6 months; start dates are flexible.
• Strong programming skills in Python, and experience with modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Hands-on experience designing, training, and debugging deep learning models for computer vision, 3D perception, or sequential decision-making.
• Solid understanding of autonomous driving fundamentals, including perception, prediction, and motion planning.
• Ability to read research critically, form hypotheses, and turn them into well-controlled experiments.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Survey the latest research in scene understanding, prediction, and planning, and turn it into practical approaches that fit our system and constraints.
• Design and implement deep learning models that build a richer, real-time understanding of the driving environment from onboard sensors and other available sources.
• Train and evaluate models on large-scale data from our driving logs and on public benchmarks, and lead failure analysis to find out where and why models fall short.
• Define metrics and evaluation methods that connect perception quality to how the vehicle actually drives.
• Turn successful prototypes into solutions that work with our planning stack, with help from production engineers.
• Collaborate with Perception, Prediction, Planning, and Mapping teams so results move from experiment to product.

Skills

Python

Deep learning

Computer vision

3D perception

Research

Experiment design

PyTorch

JAX

Data analysis

Education

MS or PhD in CS/Robotics/EE

Tools

C++

CUDA

Robotics systems

Job description

Didi Autonomous Driving in San Jose, CA is seeking a Research Intern to advance scene understanding and planning for autonomous vehicles. You will tackle hard, open problems with frontier research methods, from problem definition to validated solution, with potential to publish results.

You will work under the team lead, collaborating with perception, prediction, planning, and mapping groups. The internship emphasizes real-world impact and product-ready prototypes.