Perception Software Engineering Intern [Fall 2024]

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 Perception Team

In service of our mission to operate at global scale, we’re growing our perception capabilities, to expand quickly and safely into new products and locations, with the ultimate goal of delivering essential packages right to your doorstep. Our team is made up of engineers who are passionate about developing and shipping perception systems for the real world. This work spans the fields of classical and modern computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, localization/navigation, data analysis, sensor fusion, and more!

The Role

You will work in a fast-paced, collaborative environment to improve our perception capabilities. Your contributions will directly advance our production system development. Starting on day one, you will have the opportunity to work side-by-side with our perception experts to learn about and contribute to our complex perception stack. This role will focus on machine learning and deep learning projects.

What You'll Do  

• Investigate and develop computer vision algorithms and ML models for the perception system
• Design integrated computer vision solutions that are robust to varied weather and lighting conditions while running in real-time on constrained compute
• Build machine learning models using deep learning for computer vision tasks such as object detection and classification
• Build software infrastructure to enable learning algorithms to leverage our large-scale fleet data
• Understand the inner workings of neural networks to uncover edge cases and make safety determinations
• Identify and mitigate bottlenecks in our machine learning development processes

What You'll Bring 

• Solid foundation in machine learning and deep learning for computer vision projects, including understanding of the theory and practice of modern machine learning techniques
• Experience training deep-learning models for object detection in an end-to-end fashion, writing custom layers/operations, etc.
• Experience working with Pytorch
• Strong software engineering skills, with proficiency in relevant languages like Python, C++, or Rust
• Experience developing solutions using test-driven methods  
• Excitement for contributing to production software
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work across diverse teams with varying focuses

What Else You Should Know