Job Title: Robotics Software Internship, Manipulation

Department: Software Engineering

Reports To: Manipulation Lead

Employment Type: Internship

Location: Houston, Texas – Required (on-site)

Who We Are

Persona AI is building humanoid robots for the most demanding environments in heavy industry — shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms — performing welding, grinding, maintenance, inspection, and material-handling work that is dangerous, physically demanding, and increasingly difficult to staff.

We are backed by leading strategic and financial investors and engaged with global industrial leaders across Korea, Japan, the United States, and Singapore. Korea is the center of gravity for our early commercial strategy, anchored by relationships with the world’s leading shipbuilders and steelmakers. Our work spans both the robot platform itself and the systems, partners, and playbooks required to deploy it at scale.

Your Role:

• Help design and implement dexterous manipulation algorithms for humanoid robots with high-DOF, multi-fingered hands, working closely with senior engineers.

• Contribute to the manipulation pipeline (perception, grasping, trajectory optimization, motion planning, and control) on tasks like precise grasping, dual-arm manipulation, and in-hand object manipulation.

• Support the implementation and testing of control strategies for dexterous manipulation, including force/motion control and visual/tactile servoing.

• Assist with integrating manipulation components into the humanoid robot's whole-body controller and loco-manipulation efforts.

• Build and iterate on digital-twin simulation environments for algorithm development using simulators such as MuJoCo and Isaac Sim.

• Run and help design tests in both simulated and real-world environments, and help analyze the results.

• Partner with the machine learning team to help train and deploy models for advanced manipulation tasks.

• Stay current on manipulation research and bring relevant ideas, traditional and deep learning-based, back to the team.

We're Looking For:

• Currently pursuing a BS, MS, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechanical/Electrical Engineering, or a related field.