PhD Research Intern, Learning Embodied Skills from Human Data - 2027 - CA, Santa Clara, United States
$38 - $94 USD yearly
Originally posted 21 September 2026 by the employer — open 1 day.
About the role
This role focuses on learning embodied skills from large-scale human data for AI systems that reproduce human motion and interaction skills across physical and digital embodiments, including humanoid robots and animated characters.
What you'll do
- Innovate and implement novel AI algorithms that transform large-scale human data into controllable motion and interaction skills across physical and digital embodiments.
- Develop robust, scalable training and inference pipelines for motion reconstruction, generation, retargeting, and character and robot control.
- Build methods that transfer human skills to humanoid robots, including whole-body loco-manipulation and dexterous manipulation.
- Publish research findings at computer vision, machine learning, graphics, and robotics conferences.
- Partner with product teams to enable technology transfer of your work.
What you'll need
- Pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
- Outstanding engineering skills in rapid prototyping and developing model-training and simulation frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo).
- Excellent skills in working with large-scale machine learning/AI systems and compute infrastructure.
- A promising research track record with at least one publication at computer vision, computer graphics or robotics conference (e.g. CVPR, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, CoRL, etc.).
Nice to have
- Experience in human motion modeling, human-object interaction, character animation, robot learning, reinforcement or imitation learning, cross-embodiment motion tracking, generative modeling, video understanding, or differentiable physics simulation.
Skills: embodied AI, robotics, human motion, reinforcement learning, PyTorch
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 67-day median for AI/ML Hardware Engineering roles.
AI/ML Hardware Engineering · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
522
|
Median days open
67 d
|
Median salary
$235k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (522 roles · 76 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 84 | 522 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 963 | 5873 · 143 employers |
| Median days open | 62 d | 67 d (−5 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $235k |
Skills observed across this category: embodied AI, robotics, human motion, reinforcement learning, PyTorch
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 107 open roles · median 97 d
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 86 open roles · median 68 d
- AMD · 46 open roles · median 60 d
- Micron Technology · 32 open roles · median 40 d
- Mobileye · 25 open roles · median 54 d
- Analog Devices · 14 open roles · median 25 d
How we counted: 522 open AI/ML Hardware Engineering (AI ML Hardware) roles from 76 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 22 Sept 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.