AI Research Engineer Intern

Join Collaborative Robotics this summer as an AI Research Engineer Intern, and evaluate modern AI/ML approaches for bimanual robotic manipulation. You’ll be part of a small research team focused on understanding how recent AI/ML methods perform on real hardware — identifying where it succeeds, where it struggles, and what practical adjustments might help. This will involve reading and writing code, reading academic papers, and running experiments to evaluate and present results.

This role is well-suited for strong undergraduate seniors or graduate students (M.S. or Ph.D.) who want hands-on exposure to ML software engineering for robotics and experience training models on physical robots in an industry setting.

This role is located at our Seattle, WA office.

This is a full time, 3-month (12-week) internship running June–August 2026.

The application deadline for this role is January 11th, 2026. Interviews will take place mid-late January 2026.

Key Responsibilities:

• Review and present learnings from ML research papers on robotic manipulation.

• Evaluate and augment code to probe the strengths and weaknesses of research methods.

• Train ML models.

• Contribute to data collection.

• Take part in team standups and demos, to see how industry research is conducted.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently enrolled in a master’s or PhD program, or in the final year of an undergraduate program, in a relevant scientific discipline (e.g., Computer Science, AI/ML, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, or a related field).

• Demonstrated capability in software engineering, including Python proficiency.

• Experience with implementation of ML research models and methods.

• Eagerness to learn and collaborate with others.

• Highly motivated teammate with excellent oral and written communication skills.

• Enjoy working in a fast paced, collaborative and dynamic start-up environment as part of a small team.

• Able to work full-time (around 40 hours/week) onsite in Seattle, WA for the duration of the internship.

• Must have and maintain US work authorization.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Understanding of imitation learning, reinforcement learning, transformer models, and diffusion models.

• Published papers in relevant ML / robotics fields.

• Open-source contributions to ML / robotic learning code projects.

The non-exempt hourly range for this intern position is $40-$45/hr. Our ranges are determined by role and experience level. The range reflects the minimum and maximum target for intern rates for the position in Santa Clara, CA. Within the range, individual pay is determined by additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

Cobot is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics.

To all recruitment agencies: Cobot does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our employees. Cobot is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.