{"id":175956,"url":"https://alion.io/job/persona-ai-autonomy-software-engineering-internship-world-modeling","title":"Autonomy Software Engineering Internship, World Modeling","company":{"id":63117,"name":"Persona AI","domain":"persona.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/persona-ai","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":8,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":38,"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"Early Careers","role_family":"Early Careers","seniority":"intern","employment_type":"internship","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Houston, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":42000,"max_usd":70000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":346},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":false},{"name":"Isaac Lab","optional":false},{"name":"Isaac Sim","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Motion Planning","optional":false},{"name":"Physical AI","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"ROS","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"World Models","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-03T20:09:43Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-03","last_verified_at":"2026-10-19T06:17:51Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":76,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":76},"description":"Job Title: Autonomy Software Engineering Intern, World Modeling\nDepartment: Robotics Software Engineering\nEmployment Type: Internship\nLocation: Houston, TX - Onsite\nWho We Are\nPersona AI is building humanoid robots for the most demanding environments in heavy industry - shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms - performing welding, grinding, maintenance, inspection, and material-handling work that is dangerous, physically demanding, and increasingly difficult to staff.\nWe are backed by leading strategic and financial investors and engaged with global industrial leaders across Korea, Japan, the United States, and Singapore. Korea is the center of gravity for our early commercial strategy, anchored by relationships with the world’s leading shipbuilders and steelmakers. Our work spans both the robot platform itself and the systems, partners, and playbooks required to deploy it at scale.\nWe're looking for an Autonomy Software Engineering Intern to help build the world modeling layer of our autonomy stack. You will work hands-on with NVIDIA Cosmos3, curating real-world industrial video data from our customer facilities and fine-tuning models to give our humanoid robots a grounded understanding of the environments they operate in.\nThis is a paid summer internship based in Houston, TX. You will report to the Behavior Coordination Lead and work directly with the autonomy team alongside our machine learning, perception, and simulation engineers.\nYour Role\nDesign and implement autonomy and behavior coordination algorithms for an industrial humanoid platform\n\nWork with manipulation, locomotion, and perception engineers to integrate robot skills into autonomous robot behaviors\n\nImplement data curation pipelines that enable our robots to understand a variety of real-world industrial tasks.\n\nDevelop synthetic data generation pipelines for post-training of humanoid world models\n\nDesign and implement pipelines for autonomous behavior evaluation, benchmarking, and regression testing\n\nTurn raw industrial video footage (shipyards, steel fabrication, welding cells) into structured, high-quality training data.\n\nDesign and evaluate reasoning benchmarks that measure how well a fine-tuned world model grounds language queries in real shipyard and fabrication-plant scenes.\n\nWe're Looking For\nCurrently pursuing a BS, MS, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or a related field; recent graduates are also welcome.\n\nHands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or evaluating modern deep learning models in PyTorch.\n\nStrong Python skills; comfortable writing data processing scripts, training loops, and evaluation harnesses.\n\nWorking familiarity with at least one vision-language model, large language model, or video understanding model.\n\nPractical experience building data pipelines: ingestion, filtering, labeling workflows, deduplication, train/val/test splits.\n\nComfortable working in Linux environments with Git, containers (Docker), and cloud GPU infrastructure.\n\nSelf-directed and able to make steady progress on an open-ended research problem with weekly check-ins rather than daily direction.\n\nPreferred or Bonus Qualifications\nDirect experience with NVIDIA Cosmos or comparable world foundation models.\n\nExposure to NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Omniverse, or OpenUSD for synthetic data generation and scene variability.\n\nFamiliarity with humanoid or mobile-manipulator robotics, ROS/ROS 2, and the broader autonomy stack.\n\nExperience with motion capture data, egocentric video capture, or first-person dataset construction.\n\nExposure to behavior trees, task and motion planning, or LLM-driven planning architectures.\n\nFamiliarity with NVIDIA Isaac Lab, NIM microservices, or the Hugging Face training ecosystem.\n\nPrior internship, research, or open-source work on physical AI, embodied reasoning, or robot learning.\n\nOur Internship Program\nAt Persona AI, our internship program gives you direct, hands-on experience building cutting-edge humanoid robotics alongside industry experts. We offer full-time term opportunities across three upcoming cohorts:\nFall 2026: August - December\n\nSpring 2027: January - May\n\nSummer 2027: May - August\n\nAs an intern, you’ll be paired 1:1 with a senior engineer mentor to accelerate your growth and guide your technical contributions. You will bond with your cohort through intern group lunches, gain cross-functional perspective during company-wide learning lunches, and unwind with fun team activities throughout the term. Whether you're working on advanced motion planning or real-world system testing, you'll tackle meaningful engineering challenges while immersing yourself in our collaborative startup culture.\nApplication Review Process\nWe evaluate applications as they are received rather than waiting for the posted deadline to pass. Positions for each cohort are filled on a first-come, first-served basis, and the portal will close as soon as all available roles are finalized.\nTo give yourself the best chance of securing a spot, keep these tips in mind:\nApply Early: Submitting your resume as soon as possible ensures your materials are reviewed before interview slots fill up.\n\nCohort Availability: Popular terms-especially Summer 2027-tend to reach capacity quickly.\n\nRolling Interviews: Interviews and candidate evaluations begin immediately upon application receipt.\n\nPersona AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer.\nAll qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5729,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Robotics AI","Industrial Robotics","Humanoid Robots"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-30T14:04:30Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 2","filings_12m":2,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":172500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":11,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.399,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":76,"expected_fill_days":38,"reasons":["conf:3","win:tail","crowd:junior"],"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/persona-ai-autonomy-software-engineering-internship-world-modeling","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/persona-ai-autonomy-software-engineering-internship-world-modeling.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-19T09:29:11Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":6601,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-20T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":63117},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=63117"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fpersona-ai-autonomy-software-engineering-internship-world-modeling"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fpersona-ai-autonomy-software-engineering-internship-world-modeling"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fpersona-ai-autonomy-software-engineering-internship-world-modeling"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/persona-ai-autonomy-software-engineering-internship-world-modeling\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fpersona-ai-autonomy-software-engineering-internship-world-modeling"}]}