Aimed at advanced degree holders in AI or robotics who can work independently on open-ended research problems in a hybrid setting.
Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.
Original posting from Toyota Research Institute via Lever
At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we’re on a mission to improve the quality of human life. We’re developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. To lead this transformative shift in mobility, we’ve built a world-class team advancing the state of the art in AI, robotics, driving, and material sciences.
This is a paid 12-week internship opportunity and is a hybrid, in-office role.
Here’s a glimpse into the Internship experience from some of our TRI interns!
Responsibilities:
- Define a focused research question and experimental plan with your mentor, informed by your interests and the team’s research priorities.
- Develop methods in one or more relevant areas, such as multimodal agents, generative policies, world models, simulation, or learning from interaction.
- Build research prototypes using open-source datasets, large-scale Toyota driving data, the team’s closed-loop simulation infrastructure
- Design experiments and evaluate generalization, robustness, efficiency, or closed-loop behavior, as relevant to the project.
- Collaborate with TRI researchers and engineers to analyze results, investigate failure modes, and refine the research approach.
- Communicate findings through reproducible experiments, research presentations, and technical writing, including publication contributions where appropriate.
Qualifications:
- Currently pursuing a Ph.D. or master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
- Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch for implementing and evaluating research ideas, along with an understanding of version control, testing, and software engineering fundamentals.
- Research experience in one or more of the following: computer vision, natural language processing, generative modeling, reinforcement learning
- Demonstrated research ability, such as publications, preprints, or substantial independent research projects.
- Ability to work independently on an open-ended research problem, and to communicate methods and results clearly.
- Able to work in a hybrid in-office arrangement at TRI’s headquarters in Los Altos, California, for the full 12-week internship.
Bonus Qualifications:
- Experience with driving or robotics simulators such as CARLA or with neural rendering.
- Experience with language or vision-language models, agent systems, or multimodal reasoning.
- Experience with diffusion or flow models, generative policies, video generation, or world models.
- Experience working with real-world sensor data, such as video, lidar, IMU, or radar.
- Experience with autonomous driving, robotics, simulation, or closed-loop learning and evaluation.
- Publications at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, CoRL, ICRA, RSS
The pay range for this position at commencement of employment is expected to be between $45 and $65/hour for California-based roles. Base pay offered will depend on multiple individualized factors, including, but not limited to, a candidate's experience, skills, job-related knowledge, and market location. TRI offers a generous benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance, and paid time off benefits (including holiday pay and sick time). Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.
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