Perception Intern (Summer 2026)

Zipline • South San Francisco, CA

4h • $44 - $49

About The Position

Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building the first instant logistics system that serves all humans equally. Leveraging expertise in robotics and autonomy, Zipline designs, builds, and operates a fleet of cutting edge, autonomous delivery drones. We serve tens of millions of people around the world.
Joining Zipline’s Emerging Talent program as an intern is an opportunity to contribute to our promise of building a system that provides equitable access to critical healthcare supplies for millions of people. We believe that internships are more than just opportunities to learn by watching or doing low level tasks. We expect our interns to take on meaningful work that actively contributes to moving Zipline’s mission forward, while learning real-world skills that will serve them in their careers for the long term.
Join us, and build the future of logistics with the best humans around!
About the Droid Perception Team
The Droid Perception team both onboard and offboard (cloud-side) perception systems that inform, validate, and augment our onboard autonomy. From generating rich 3D and semantic priors from aerial survey data to learning customer preferences and terrain features at scale, your work will help define how we prepare Zipline aircraft to perform mission-critical deliveries in complex, real-world environments.
The Role
You'll dive into ML model experimentation, eval and integration - pushing the boundaries of our current perception system. Our distinctive challenges require groundbreaking approaches, and you'll have the chance to see your ideas transition from concept to real-world application. In a fast-paced and collaborative environment, you'll look at current research in the field, and use that to propose novel solutions to our pressing perception challenges. Join us, and be at the frontier of shaping the future of autonomous deliveries.

Requirements

• A proven history of quality ML research, reflected by publications in conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, CoRL, RSS, etc.
• Specific expertise in areas such as depth estimation, semantic segmentation, 3D perception, etc.
• Proficiency with deep learning frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
• Experience writing code in a production environment, e.g. at a previous internship.
• Ability to rapidly experiment, iterate, and adapt to new findings in a dynamic environment.

Responsibilities

• Experiment and ideate on learning-based solutions for unique perception challenges.
• Transition experimental solutions to scalable, real-world applications.
• Collaborate closely with team members, brainstorming and deriving creative solutions from first principles.
• Build tools to streamline processes and encourage engineering excellence.
• Share findings and insights, fostering knowledge exchange across teams.
• Drive the transition of experimental models into practical, operational systems.

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: No Education Listed