You'll work on the stack that gets a policy from "recorded a human doing it" to "running on a line." Depending on your strengths and what's on fire, that could mean:
* **Data collection tooling.** Teleop capture, episode management, labeling pipelines. The difference between 8 minutes of usable demonstrations and 8 minutes of garbage is almost entirely tooling.
* **Training and evaluation infrastructure.** Reproducible runs, checkpoint management, and — the part everyone skips — real evaluation harnesses. If we can't measure a policy's success rate with enough trials to trust the number, we don't know anything.
* **Policy work.** Imitation learning (ACT, diffusion policies), visual servoing, observation-space design. Our experience matches the published literature here: what you condition the policy on matters more than which backbone you pick.
* **Perception glue.** Segmentation and tracking models feeding structured observations to controllers. Lots of SAM2, DINOv2, and small task-specific networks.
* **Deployment.** Getting the above onto real hardware, at real control frequencies, without it falling over on hour four.
You will also do unglamorous things: fix the data loader, chase a 20 Hz timing mismatch, re-cut a fixture, sit next to the cell and watch it fail 40 times. This is the job.
## What we're looking for
**Required**
* Strong Python. You've written code other people had to maintain.
* Comfort with PyTorch — you can read a training loop and know where to put a breakpoint.
* Enough Linux and git to be self-sufficient.
* Empirical instincts. When something doesn't work, your first move is to isolate a variable, not to change three things and re-run.
* Currently enrolled in CS, EE, ME, robotics, or equivalent — or you can demonstrate the skills some other way. We care about the second clause.
**Nice to have** (genuinely optional — we don't expect all of these)
* Hands on real robots: ROS/ROS2, arm kinematics, cameras, calibration.
* Familiarity with modern manipulation policies — ACT, Diffusion Policy, VLAs (π0, RDT, OpenVLA, GR00T).
* CAD, fixturing, or any ability to make a physical thing exist.
* You've run an experiment that failed and can explain precisely why.
**What we don't require**
* Publications.
* Prior internships.
* Knowing the specific model families above. If you can learn fast and debug carefully, the domain is learnable in weeks.
## How we work
* **Small scope, real ownership.** You'll own something that ships, not a side quest that gets archived in September.
* **Evidence over vibes.** We read papers, and we assume their numbers are optimistic until we reproduce them. Independent verification is a first-class activity here.
* **Honest failure reporting.** Telling us early that an approach isn't working is more valuable than making it look like it is.
* **Physical reality wins.** A load cell and an if-statement beat an elegant policy that can't sense the thing it needs to sense.
Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
