Research Intern — Scene Understanding & Planning (Autonomy)

New Grad; 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 tackle hard problems in scene understanding, perception, and planning. You will report to the team lead and drive research from definition to validated solutions that feed into the product.

Ideal candidates are enrolled in an MS/PhD program in CS, robotics, or ML with hands-on DL experience and strong communication. The role is full-time onsite for 3–6 months, with flexible start dates.

Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in an MS or PhD program in CS, robotics, EE, ML for full duration of internship.
• Available for a full-time onsite internship of 3-6 months; start dates flexible.
• Strong programming skills in Python and experience with PyTorch or JAX.
• Hands-on experience designing, training, and debugging deep learning models for CV, 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

Autonomous driving fundamentals

Research skills

Communication skills

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/ML/Robotics

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

CUDA (C++)

Job description

DiDi Autonomous Driving in San Jose, CA is seeking a Research Intern to tackle hard problems in scene understanding, perception, and planning. You will report to the team lead and drive research from definition to validated solutions that feed into the product.

Ideal candidates are enrolled in an MS/PhD program in CS, robotics, or ML with hands-on DL experience and strong communication. The role is full-time onsite for 3–6 months, with flexible start dates.