2026 Summer Robotics Engineering Intern: AI (Special Projects)

Summary

Headquartered in sunny Los Angeles, GrayMatter Robotics is a well-capitalized AI robotics startup serving the manufacturing industry. We empower shop floor workers with our smart robots that assist with tedious and ergonomically challenging tasks, specifically in automated surface finishing. Our proprietary GMR-AI™ software is integrated with state-of-the-art industrial robots, sensors, and tools to create application-specific turnkey solutions for customers through a Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) model.

Position Overview

As an AI Intern, Special Projects, you will own a research or engineering problem end-to-end across our AI and robotics stack. Projects are tailored to both your background and our roadmap, with the expectation that your work will either ship into production or directly influence product direction by the end of the internship.

You will collaborate closely with senior researchers and engineers, present your work internally and occasionally to external partners, and gain hands-on access to real robot hardware, manufacturing cells, and production-scale datasets.

What You’ll Work On

• Foundation Models for Manufacturing

  • Multimodal models for industrial perception, scene understanding, and task planning

• Policy Learning

  • Learning-based control for contact-rich manipulation under geometric, material, and contact uncertainty

• Sim-to-Real Transfer

  • Physics-based simulation, domain randomization, and bridging the gap between simulation and hardware

• 3D Perception & Scene Understanding

  • Real-time point cloud processing, surface reconstruction, defect detection, and anomaly detection in manufacturing environments

• World Models & Learned Dynamics

  • Tool–surface interaction models for planning, rollout prediction, and uncertainty-aware skill selection

Basic Qualifications

We are looking for researchers and engineers who combine strong technical depth with a builder mindset. Ideal candidates will have most of the following:

• Currently pursuing or recently completed a Master’s or PhD in AI, Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field

  • Exceptional undergraduate candidates will also be considered

• Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or adapting modern machine learning models, including:

  • Foundation models

  • Multimodal models

  • Diffusion policies

  • Large-scale self-supervised learning systems

• Working knowledge of robotic systems, including:

  • Kinematics

  • Control systems

  • Sensors and perception

  • Hardware debugging and deployment intuition

• Experience with physics-based robotics simulators and a practical understanding of sim-to-real limitations

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with proficiency in:

  • Python

  • PyTorch

  • Production-quality code development

• Demonstrated ownership of projects end-to-end through:

  • Publications

  • Deployed systems

  • Open-source contributions

  • AVAILABLE TO START IMMEDIATELY for Summer '26 Internship

Preferred Qualifications

• First-author publications at leading conferences such as:

  • CoRL

  • RSS

  • ICRA

  • IROS

  • NeurIPS

  • ICML

  • ICLR

  • CVPR

• Experience deploying learned policies or perception systems on real-world robotic hardware, especially in industrial environments

• Background in:

  • Distributed training systems

  • Custom CUDA kernels

  • Large-scale pretraining

• Prior work involving:

  • Contact-rich manipulation

  • Force/torque control

  • Surface inspection

  • Industrial automation

• Meaningful open-source contributions to robotics, simulation, or ML infrastructure frameworks

GrayMatter Robotics provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We encourage and embrace applicants of all backgrounds to apply!

GrayMatter Robotics is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you believe you require accommodations during the recruiting process, please contact accommodations@graymatter-robotics.com to submit your request.

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice.

Depending on the position and if listed, compensation may include the base salary range, bonus or commission, and equity. We also provide comprehensive benefits and perks which include but are not limited to medical, dental, vision, unlimited PTO, 401(k) plan + employer match, regular offsite events, a discretionary fund for enhancing productivity and so much more! The range listed on job postings reflect the minimum and maximum new hire salary across levels in Los Angeles, CA.