Reinforcement Learning Engineering Intern

Department: Persona AI

Location: Pensacola, FL or Houston, TX

Employment Type: Intern

Persona AI is developing and commercializing rugged, multi-purpose humanoid robots that perform real work. Persona’s founding team has a decades-long history in humanoid robotics, bionics, and product development delivering robust hardware that has touched the stars, worked miles below the surface of the ocean, and even roamed Disney Parks. Our mission is focused squarely on shipping beautiful, reliable products at massive scale, while building a customer-focused team to achieve these aims.

Reinforcement Learning Engineering Intern

Location: Downtown Pensacola, FL
Type: Full-time Internship, 40 hours/week

About the Internship

The Reinforcement Learning Engineering Internship is an opportunity for Bachelors and Masters candidate students to join and contribute to the Persona team as we develop our industrial humanoids. Our objective is to provide each intern with a positive learning environment, hands-on experience with humanoids, and ownership over their own project direction. We are looking for students with an excitement for learning, technical excellence, and creative problem-solving skills.

Each intern will have a designated mentor to provide guidance and assistance in developing and making progress towards a target goal. We have a strong bias for projects that lead to software, controls, or policies deployed on our hardware and extending the capabilities of our systems. Projects will be jointly planned by the intern and their mentor to build on the intern’s background, extend their experience to new areas of interest, and fit into the broader goals of the Persona reinforcement learning team.

Role Description

For this role, the specific tasks will be defined prior to the start date by the mentor and the intern based on their experience, proficiency, and personal interests. The scope may also be adjusted to fit the project within the intern’s time-frame. We encourage interns to share their interests even if they may be entirely different from their technical background. Some example general tasks that may be a part of any project are described below:

• Develop new simulation training environments

• Design new behaviors or extend capabilities for the Persona robots

• Deploy to hardware, log data, and analyze results

• Create or implement new algorithms for modeling, training, sensing, or deployment

• Characterize hardware sensors, actuators, and general robot parameters

Qualifications

• Current Undergraduate or Masters student

• Software proficiency in Python, C/C++, Java, or Rust

• Experience with basic machine learning concepts

Bonus Experience

• Worked with Pytorch or similar

• Physics simulator experience such as IsaacLab/IsaacSim, Mujoco, or similar

• Deployed controls software to robot hardware

• Trained policies with reinforcement learning

• Worked with motion diffusion models or VLAs

• Experience with character animation

• Worked on vision or localization

Open Technical Areas

• Perception

• Locomotion

• Manipulation

• Motion Planning

• Imitation Learning

• Motion Retargeting

• Sim-to-Real Modeling

Application Timeline

We are accepting applications on a rolling basis. We will interview and make offers for upcoming intern cohorts until we fill all openings. We will close the application process for an upcoming cohort approximately 3 months before the start of the cohort and recommend applying approximately 6 months in advance.

Note: we are no longer accepting applications for Summer 2026.

The interview process we are currently following involves two interviews. First, a phone pre-screen with a member of our staff. Second, a presentation and discussion interview with one to two of our engineers. The presentation is meant to be informal and give an opportunity for you to share your background, experiences, and interests. We like the chance to see pictures and videos of your projects and hear what part of robotics excites you most! We will also give an overview of the work we are doing here at Persona AI and leave time for you to ask us questions.

We aim to get back to you as soon as we can but it may take a few weeks, especially in between cohorts. Please know we are working on it and will get back to every application!

Why join Persona AI?

• You'll shape technology that's redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.

• Work alongside passionate teammates who value diversity, creativity, and continuous learning.

• Enjoy full access to advanced prototyping tools, labs, and the freedom to experiment and innovate.

• We offer competitive compensation, excellent benefits, flexible work environment, and equity opportunities.

Persona AI embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.