Autonomy Software Engineering Internship, World Modeling

Location

• Houston, TX – Onsite
• Persona AI is developing and commercializing rugged, multi-purpose humanoid robots that perform real work. Persona's founding team has a decades-long history in humanoid robotics, bionics, and product development delivering robust hardware that has touched the stars, worked miles below the surface of the ocean, and even roamed Disney Parks. Our mission is focused squarely on shipping beautiful, reliable products at massive scale, while building a customer-focused team to achieve these aims.
• We're looking for an Autonomy Software Engineering Intern to help build the world modeling layer of our autonomy stack. You will work hands-on with NVIDIA Cosmos3, curating real-world industrial video data from our customer facilities and fine-tuning models to give our humanoid robots a grounded understanding of the environments they operate in.
• This is a paid summer internship based in Houston, TX. You will report to the Behavior Coordination Lead and work directly with the autonomy team alongside our machine learning, perception, and simulation engineers.

Your Role

• Design and implement autonomy and behavior coordination algorithms for an industrial humanoid platform
• Work with manipulation, locomotion, and perception engineers to integrate robot skills into autonomous robot behaviors
• Implement data curation pipelines that enable our robots to understand a variety of real-world industrial tasks.
• Develop synthetic data generation pipelines for post-training of humanoid world models
• Design and implement pipelines for autonomous behavior evaluation, benchmarking, and regression testing
• Turn raw industrial video footage (shipyards, steel fabrication, welding cells) into structured, high-quality training data.
• Design and evaluate reasoning benchmarks that measure how well a fine-tuned world model grounds language queries in real shipyard and fabrication-plant scenes.

We're Looking For