AI Research Engineer Intern (PhD), Real-Time Inference for Embodied AI

RoboForce • Milpitas, CA

18h • Onsite

About The Position

We are seeking an AI Research Engineer Intern (PhD) to join us in building the next generation of Embodied AI systems for robotics, with a focus on real-time model inference, systems optimization, and deployment efficiency.
In this role, you will work at the intersection of foundation models, robotics, and high-performance ML systems, helping make advanced robot intelligence practical for real-world deployment. You will collaborate with a world-class team of researchers and engineers to optimize model serving, reduce latency, improve throughput, and enable reliable on-robot inference for embodied decision-making. This is a highly applied research role with opportunities to contribute to impactful systems work and, where appropriate, research publications at top-tier venues.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing or recently completed a PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Machine Learning, Systems, or a related field.
• Strong background in machine learning systems, model inference optimization, or efficient deep learning.
• Experience optimizing modern ML models for production or low-latency deployment.
• Hands-on experience with one or more of the following: real-time inference systems efficient transformer inference model compression, pruning, quantization, or distillation GPU performance optimization deployment frameworks such as TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, XLA, TVM, Triton, or similar systems
• Proficiency with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
• Strong programming and systems skills, including experience with performance profiling and debugging.
• Ability to work across the stack, from model architecture to runtime systems and hardware-aware optimization.
• Requires 5 days/week in-office collaboration with the team.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with Embodied AI, robot learning, or robotics foundation models.
• Experience optimizing multimodal or autoregressive models for low-latency inference.
• Understanding of robotics system constraints such as control-loop timing, sensor fusion latency, and edge compute limitations.
• Experience with deployment on embedded or edge hardware for robotics.
• Exposure to compiler-based optimization, CUDA programming, custom kernels, or distributed inference systems.
• Interest in co-design across model architecture, inference runtime, and robotic execution.

Responsibilities

• Research and develop techniques to enable real-time inference for embodied AI models deployed on robotic platforms.
• Optimize inference performance for models such as: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models World models Multimodal transformer-based policies Perception and state estimation models used in robot control loops
• Improve model latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and system reliability through methods such as: model compression quantization distillation batching and scheduling optimization KV-cache / decoding optimization graph compilation and kernel-level acceleration
• Collaborate with robotics, infrastructure, and hardware teams to integrate optimized models into real robot stacks and edge/on-device systems.
• Design benchmarking pipelines for evaluating end-to-end performance, including control frequency, action latency, and system robustness under real deployment constraints.
• Explore tradeoffs between model quality and runtime efficiency to support practical deployment in real-world robotic tasks.
• Contribute to internal technical reports, system design discussions, and publications where appropriate.

Benefits

• Work on high-impact problems at the frontier of AI systems and robotics
• Help turn cutting-edge embodied AI models into practical real-world robotic capabilities
• Collaborate with a deeply technical team spanning research, systems, and hardware
• Gain hands-on experience with challenging deployment problems in real robotic settings
• Opportunity to contribute to research publications and advance the state of the art in efficient embodied AI

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree