AI Research Intern (PhD)

Who we are

Atoms is building the machines that power the next era of progress.

Over the last decade, software has transformed the digital world. But the physical world, where food is made, minerals are mined, goods are moved, and industries are run, remains far less intelligent, far less efficient, and far more constrained. We’re changing that.

Atoms builds Physical AI real-world robots for the industries that move civilization forward, starting with food, mining, and transport. Our systems are designed to understand, predict, and control the real world with precision, turning complex physical operations into something more reliable, more scalable, and more productive.

This work requires more than robotics. It requires deep integration across hardware, software, AI, operations, manufacturing, and real estate. We don’t just build machines in a lab. We deploy them into real environments, operate them, learn from them, and improve them until they work at scale.

We are roboticists, engineers, operators, and builders. We believe the next great technology companies will not only transform information, but the physical systems that shape everyday life.

If you want to work on hard problems with real-world impact, join us.

About the Role

We are seeking an AI Research Intern to join our founding team and bridge the gap between high-level AI research and real-world physical actuation for our next-generation autonomous transport platforms. In this role, you will contribute to core research initiatives on Perception, World Models and Action models. You will help translate cutting-edge theoretical breakthroughs into scalable, real-world deployment on physical autonomous systems, driving how our platforms perceive, simulate, and navigate complex environments.

What you'll do

• Integrate emerging research from the broader AI community, identifying and prototyping the most promising solutions.
• Design and build end-to-end multimodal models that translate real-time visual perception and high-level behavioral goals into physical vehicle actuation.
• Research and develop cutting-edge RL and distillation techniques for trajectory planning.
• Develop interactive world models from raw multi-sensor logs, allowing the team to re-simulate events and query what a vehicle would see if it altered its trajectory.
• Ensure core autonomous driving models can seamlessly adapt to novel urban environments and edge cases.
• Partner with validation and research teams to run model experiments through rigorous simulated scenarios, detecting regressions and identifying systemic performance bottlenecks.

What we're looking for

• Education: Currently enrolled in a PhD degree program in Computer Science, EECS, Robotics, AI, or a closely related field.
• Research Track Record: Publications or active submissions in top-tier AI or robotics venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, RSS, ICRA, CoRL).
• Core Expertise: PhD level research background focused on at least one of the following domains:
• Generative World Models / Video Generation / Diffusion Models
• Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models or embodied AI
• Reinforcement Learning (RL), trajectory optimization, or decision-making systems
• Large-scale multimodal Transformer architectures applied to robotics or spatio-temporal data
• Framework Fluency: Advanced hands-on proficiency with PyTorch or JAX for training and fine-tuning large-scale neural networks.
• Programming: Proficiency in Python and working knowledge of C++.

Preferred qualifications

• Prior research or internship experience in autonomous driving, mobile robotics, or spatial AI.
• Hands-on experience with Sensor Fusion integrating inputs across multi-camera setups, LiDAR, and Radar.
• Familiarity with Bird’s-Eye-View (BEV) visual representations, 3D occupancy forecasting, multi-task learning, or specialized data tokenization for spatial data.
• Prior experience with large-scale distributed training on GPU/TPU clusters (e.g., DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM, Ray, or PyTorch FSDP).

Why join us

At Atoms, you’ll work on one of the defining challenges of our time bringing automation into the physical world to drive real, lasting impact. We exist to uncover valuable unknown truths and turn them into progress, which means constantly pushing beyond what’s known and building what doesn’t yet exist. The work is ambitious and often challenging, but it’s grounded in a shared sense of purpose and a team committed to seeing it through together. Our work only matters if it serves others, and we know that meaningful progress depends on the trust of the people we serve and the strength of our team so we invest in both, creating an environment where you can do your best work and grow.

What else you need to know

This role is based in our Mountain View or San Francisco office. Atoms is a company driven by invention and continuous change, we are constantly reimagining our industries, building new products, and refining how we operate. We do our best work together. That’s why all of our office-based teams work onsite, five days a week.

The hourly pay range for this internship role is $70/hr per hour.

Actual compensation will be determined on an individual basis and may vary depending on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Atoms accepts applications on an ongoing basis.