Droid Autonomy Intern (Summer 2027)
Zipline · South San Francisco, California, USA
About this role
**About Zipline** Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We’re on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine, and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate a global autonomous logistics system that delivers critical supplies quickly and reliably—operating across four continents and completing millions of deliveries to date. **About the Droid Planning Team** The Droid Autonomy team owns the autonomy stack behind droid package pickup and delivery, including: - **Perception** (understanding the world) - **High-level decision making** (executing behaviors) - **Motion planning** (navigating through obstacles safely and efficiently) This is an **extremely cross-functional team** bringing together robotics, machine learning, planning, and systems engineering to build a safe, reliable, scalable real-world delivery system. **Role: Droid Autonomy Intern (Summer 2027)** You’ll work hands-on with an autonomous robot operating in the real world to help expand its capabilities for safer and more reliable deliveries. You’ll analyze and validate real-world data, design experiments, and translate insights into actionable improvements that impact the speed, accuracy, and safety of deliveries. **What You’ll Do** - Work with and iterate on a state-of-the-art autonomous system by analyzing flight data, extracting key performance features, and improving motion planning in difficult/uncertain environments - Apply **data analysis, statistics, and machine learning** to increase reliability and robustness - Design and run **validation experiments** to measure success/failure rates under real-world conditions (e.g., driveway geometry, car presence, time of day) - Develop tools and pipelines to evaluate motion planning models, quantify uncertainty, and connect improvements to field performance - Collaborate across perception, autonomy, and flight testing teams to see how your work fits into the full robotics stack - Gain experience with the **end-to-end process of deploying autonomy at scale** (data collection → model development → validation → live operations) **What You’ll Bring** - Currently pursuing a **Master’s** in CS, EE, Robotics, or a related field, with familiarity with **learning-based planning methods** - **Software proficiency** and the ability to write safe, performant code (willing to learn new languages and adapt) - **Statistical reasoning & validation mindset**: design experiments, account for bias/variance, quantify confidence, and interpret results - **Structured problem-solving**: break ambiguous real-world problems into hypotheses and executable plans; comfortable making/testing assumptions - Ability to work **in person** at the office and thrive in a collaborative, hands-on environment **Additional Notes** - Final cash pay depends on experience, qualifications, skills, and working location. The compensation package may include a housing stipend, overtime pay, relocation support, paid sick time, and more. - Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. - Zipline also requests voluntary self-identification for government reporting purposes (optional; does not affect hiring decisions).
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