Perception Intern (Summer 2027)

About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. 

Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

About the Droid Perception Team

The Droid Perception team owns both the onboard perception system that operates in a constrained compute regime on the drone and the offboard perception system that is built to augment, validate and improve the onboard system. Both onboard and offboard perception systems are camera-only systems that do not use LiDAR. The team’s work involves:

• Creating robust pipelines to process large datasets to train various models
• Training cutting-edge machine learning models of various types and sizes that understand the 3D structure as well as the semantics and enable us to make safe deliveries at scale
• Writing clean, high-quality code to train models to utilize GPUs efficiently
• Building autonomous systems that run on the drone as well as in the cloud that use the machine learning models to power Zipline’s P2 platform
• Optimizing the onboard models into TensorRT engines to deliver high throughput within a limited compute budget
• Understanding the failure modes of the onboard and offboard perception systems and designing solutions to solve them
• Interfacing with the planning, navigation, maps, and hardware teams to understand each other’s needs and design systems accordingly

The Role 

As an intern in the Droid Perception team, you will dive into ML model experimentation, evaluation and integration to push the boundaries of our current onboard and offboard perception systems.

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 large datasets from heterogeneous sources (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. Master’s and PhD students are also eligible 
• Good theoretical understanding of 3D computer vision and various camera models
• Hands-on expertise in and in-depth understanding of one or more of the following areas: multi-view depth estimation, semantic segmentation, Gaussian splatting, generative modeling, BEV-style models, VLAs, VLMs, model optimization
• Deep understanding of state-of-the-art research and trends in one or more of the following areas: multi-view depth estimation, semantic segmentation, Gaussian splatting, generative modeling, BEV-style models, VLAs, VLMs, model optimization
• Proficiency with deep learning frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow
• Experience writing high-quality 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 office. We will host our Summer 2027 interns from this summer (May/June - August/September).

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.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.