Perception Intern (Fall 2026)

About the Droid Perception Team

The Droid Perception team owns both onboard and offboard (cloud-side) perception systems that inform, validate, and augment our onboard autonomy. From generating rich 3D and semantic priors from aerial survey data to learning customer preferences and terrain features at scale, your work will help define how we prepare Zipline aircraft to perform mission-critical deliveries in complex, real-world environments.

The Role

You'll dive into ML model experimentation, evaluation and integration - pushing the boundaries of our current offboard perception system. Our distinctive challenges require groundbreaking approaches, and you'll have the chance to see your ideas transition from concept to real-world application. In a fast-paced and collaborative environment, you'll look at current research in the field, and use that to propose novel solutions to our pressing perception challenges. Join us, and be at the frontier of shaping the future of autonomous deliveries.

What You'll Do

• Ideate, experiment and iterate on learning-based solutions for unique perception challenges.
• Collaborate closely with team members, brainstorming and deriving creative solutions from first principles.
• Leverage heterogeneous sources of data (real-world, simulation and internet-scale data) to train machine learning models.
• Ship production code to train, validate and integrate models into the perception system.
• Share findings and insights, fostering knowledge exchange across teams.

What You'll Bring

• You must have completed the second year of your undergraduate studies. Masters and PhD students are also eligible.
• A proven history of quality ML research, reflected by publications in conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, CoRL, RSS, etc.
• Specific expertise in areas such as multi view depth estimation, semantic segmentation, generative modeling, etc.
• Proficiency with deep learning frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
• Experience writing code in a production environment, e.g. at a previous internship.
• Ability to rapidly experiment, iterate, and adapt to new findings in a dynamic environment.

What Else You Should Know

Our internships are full-time positions, in-person at our South San Francisco or Dallas office. We will host our Fall 2026 interns from September to December.

The hourly rate for this internship is $50 per hour. Additional benefits may include relocation support, a housing stipend, overtime pay, paid sick time, and other benefits, where applicable and subject to local requirements.

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer 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 or our own sensibilities.

Zipline is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. Please let your point of contact at Zipline know if you require any accommodations throughout your interview process.