VLA Planning & Control Intern - Autonomous Driving

CARIAD, Inc.; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 62,000 - 132,000; Full time

Job summary

CARIAD, Inc. in Mountain View, CA is seeking an Engineer I for the VLA Planning and Control Deployment Internship. You will work with planning and deployment engineers to improve trajectories using optimization and control methods, building toward robust, feasible AI-driven vehicle behavior.

The role emphasizes constrained optimization, trajectory refinement, and integration of learned model outputs with deployment code. Local, on-site availability is required for this internship.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a degree in OR, control, robotics, electrical engineering, or applied math.
• Hands-on experience with QP or classical control (MPC, LQR, PID).
• Ability to implement in Python or C++ and contribute to deployment code.
• Must be local in Mountain View, CA and available for internship.

Responsibilities

• Prototype, train, and fine-tune VLA models or supporting perception and world-model components.
• Prepare driving datasets and evaluation splits; improve data quality and coverage.
• Run controlled experiments and ablations and maintain reproducible configurations and experiment records.
• Document methods, results, and limitations; review code and present findings.

Skills

Optimization basics

Linear algebra

Dynamical systems

Python

C++

Education

Pursuing a degree in Operations Research/Control Engineering/Robotics/Electrical Engineering/Applied Mathematics

Tools

OSQP

qpOASES

HPIPM

Job description

CARIAD, Inc. in Mountain View, CA is seeking an Engineer I for the VLA Planning and Control Deployment Internship. You will work with planning and deployment engineers to improve trajectories using optimization and control methods, building toward robust, feasible AI-driven vehicle behavior.

The role emphasizes constrained optimization, trajectory refinement, and integration of learned model outputs with deployment code. Local, on-site availability is required for this internship.