ML/AI Research Internship - PhD

About the Role

We are seeking a visionary AI/ML Research Intern to join our founding team and bridge the gap between high-level AI research and real-world physical actuation for our next-generation autonomous transport platforms.

In this role, you will contribute to core research initiatives on World Models and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. You will help translate cutting-edge theoretical breakthroughs into scalable, real-world deployment on physical autonomous systems, driving how our platforms perceive, simulate, and navigate complex environments.

What you'll do

• Research and develop cutting-edge RL and distillation techniques for trajectory planning.
• Integrate emerging research from the broader AI community, identifying and prototyping the most promising solutions.
• Design and prototype end-to-end multimodal models that translate real-time visual perception and high-level behavioral goals into physical vehicle actuation.
• Develop interactive world models from raw multi-sensor logs, allowing the team to re-simulate events and query what a vehicle would see if it altered its trajectory.
• Ensure core autonomous driving models can seamlessly adapt to novel urban environments and edge cases.
• Partner with validation and research teams to run model experiments through rigorous simulated scenarios, detecting regressions and identifying systemic performance bottlenecks.

What we're looking for

• Education: Currently enrolled in a PhD degree program in Computer Science, EECS, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a closely related quantitative field.
• Research Track Record: Publications or submissions in top-tier machine learning or robotics venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, RSS, ICRA, CoRL).
• Core Expertise: Graduate-level research background focused on at least one of the following domains:
• Generative World Models / Video Generation / Diffusion Models
• Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models or embodied AI
• Reinforcement Learning (RL), trajectory optimization, or decision-making systems
• Large-scale multimodal Transformer architectures applied to robotics or spatio-temporal data
• Framework Fluency: Advanced hands-on proficiency with PyTorch or JAX for training and fine-tuning large-scale neural networks.
• Programming: Proficiency in Python and working knowledge of C++.

Preferred qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Sensor Fusion integrating inputs across multi-camera setups, LiDAR, and Radar.
• Familiarity with Bird’s-Eye-View (BEV) visual representations, 3D occupancy forecasting, multi-task learning, or specialized data tokenization for spatial data.
• Prior experience with large-scale distributed training on GPU/TPU clusters (e.g., DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM, Ray, or PyTorch FSDP).
• Prior research or internship experience in autonomous driving, mobile robotics, or spatial AI.

What else you need to know

This role is based in our Mountain View or San Francisco office. Atoms is a company driven by invention and continuous change, we are constantly reimagining our industries, building new products, and refining how we operate. We do our best work together. That’s why all of our office-based teams work onsite, five days a week.

The hourly pay range for this internship role is $70/hr per hour.

Actual compensation will be determined on an individual basis and may vary depending on experience, skills, and qualifications.

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