Robotics Research Internship - Locomotion & Planning (Robotics)

Location: Fully onsite in Irvine, California, United States

Salary: $45–$60 per hour

Company

hirify.global develops autonomous robotic systems and foundational models for perception, planning, localization, and manipulation in unstructured real-world environments.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and evaluate reinforcement learning pipelines integrating locomotion control with learning-based planning.
• Develop sim-to-real transfer strategies using domain randomization, system identification, and adaptive methods.
• Build and use GPU-accelerated simulation environments with Isaac Gym, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, or similar tools.
• Test and iterate on policies using real legged robot platforms in unstructured environments.
• Develop experimental tooling for data collection, evaluation, reproducibility, and field validation.
• Collaborate with systems, perception, and embedded engineers while using telemetry and field data to improve model generalization.

Requirements

• Current PhD student in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, AI/ML, or a related field.
• Research experience in reinforcement learning for continuous control, locomotion, or learning-based planning.
• Strong foundation in contact dynamics, control theory, and kinematics.
• Proficiency in Python and/or C++ and experience with robotics or machine learning tooling.
• Experience designing experiments and evaluating results in simulation or on robotic hardware.
• Ability to work onsite from the Irvine, California office.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with quadruped, wheeled-quadruped, bipedal, or exoskeleton platforms.
• Experience with sim-to-real transfer, learning-based planning, motion planning, or terrain-adaptive control.
• Familiarity with ROS or ROS2.
• Publications, preprints, or open-source contributions in locomotion, reinforcement learning, planning, or control.
• Experience deploying neural network controllers on resource-constrained or real-time robotic platforms.

Culture & Benefits

• Fully onsite collaboration with flexible working hours.
• Work on autonomous robots designed for unpredictable, unstructured environments.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers with experience from leading robotics, AI, aerospace, and automotive organizations.
• Inclusive environment with evaluation based on merit, qualifications, and performance.