Engineering Intern

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $1.6K – $2.5K per week

Employment Type: FullTime

Company Overview

Verne Robotics is building intelligent robotic arms that can learn new skills in hours, not months. Backed by Y Combinator and top-tier Silicon Valley investors, we’re turning “physical AI” into reality — helping industries facing acute labor shortages (hospitality, logistics, manufacturing, and more) automate back-of-house tasks like packaging, kitting, and folding.

Our flagship platform combines affordable robotic arm hardware with cutting-edge imitation learning algorithms, enabling reliable, sample-efficient robots that deliver customer value from day one. We’re already working with pilot partners across multiple sectors and scaling rapidly.

The founding team brings experience from Apple, Stanford, and Microsoft, with deep expertise in robotics, embodied AI, and large-scale machine learning. At Verne Robotics, we believe general-purpose robotics starts with one well-executed skill at a time, and we’re assembling a world-class team to make it happen.

Description

We’re looking for a sharp, ambitious Engineering Intern to join us. In this role, you’ll get hands-on experience at the intersection of software, hardware, and robotics. You’ll work directly with our fleet of robot arms and sensors in our Bay Area lab, helping to prototype new capabilities, improve reliability, and bring real-world automation to life.

Projects may include building teleoperation infrastructure, deploying and testing robot policy models on physical hardware, developing robot infrastructure software, and creating data visualization tools to accelerate iteration. You’ll be contributing to core engineering projects that ship to customers and see your work make an immediate impact.

For the right candidate, this role can also serve as a pathway to a full-time Robotics Engineer position. We’re moving fast—and you’ll be in the middle of it.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement manipulation algorithms on real and simulated robot platforms

• Run experiments on physical robot arms, and help improve our tele-operation and control systems

• Work closely with the founding team on high-impact projects spanning perception, control, and systems integration

• Contribute to infrastructure for testing, visualization, and reproducibility of experiments

• Occasionally get hands-on with hardware—assembling robots, swapping sensors, and keeping our fleet running smoothly

Qualifications

• Current BS, MS or PhD student in Robotics, Computer Science, AI, or a related field

• Hands-on experience with robotic systems (e.g., Franka, UR, Kinova) or simulators (e.g., PyBullet, Mujoco)

• Familiarity with modern policy learning techniques (e.g., imitation learning, reinforcement learning, diffusion policies)

• Proficiency in Python

• Have experience in PyTorch

• Passion for physical AI, real-world deployment, and solving hard problems with small teams

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment

Details and Compensation

• Location: Bay Area required, office in South SF

• Duration: 12 weeks

Perks: Free meals vouchers, hardware access, mentorship from experienced founders, opportunity to convert to full-time

Join Us

At Verne Robotics, you won’t be one of a hundred interns, you’ll be a core part of the team. You’ll write code that runs on real robots and help shape the future of physical AI. If you’re excited about robots, eager to build fast, and ready to learn a ton, we’d love to hear from you.