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Research Scientist Intern, Robotics Foundation Models (PhD)

Meta· Artificial Intelligence
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ZurichInternPosted 4d ago

About the role

Internship at Meta Reality Labs Research focused on designing and improving architectures for foundation models in robotic manipulation, including vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world action models (WAMs). Prototyping architectures, running experiments, and testing in simulation and on real robots during a 12–24 week program with multiple start dates.

Responsibilities

  • Design and evaluate policy architectures for WAMs and VLAs, including action representations, diffusion and flow-based action heads, and integration with pretrained vision-language and video backbones.
  • Study how architecture choices affect generalization across tasks and embodiments, scaling with data and compute, and inference latency.
  • Develop techniques that make large policies fast enough for real-time control on robots.
  • Train models at scale on large, heterogeneous robot and video datasets, including multi-node distributed training.
  • Design controlled experiments and ablations that isolate which design choices matter, and evaluate models in simulation and on real robots.
  • Collaborate with research scientists and engineers to bring the most promising architectures into the team’s foundation models.
  • Communicate research findings and publish results at leading machine learning, computer vision, and robotics venues.

Qualifications

  • Currently has or is in the process of obtaining a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning or related STEM field
  • Experience with any of the following research areas: robotics, motion planning, embodied AI, human-robot interaction, sim-to-real transfer, learning from demonstration, reinforcement learning, dexterous manipulation, digital agents, vision language models, computer vision, egocentric perception, and/or LLMs
  • Experience with machine learning models, and frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc
  • Interpersonal experience: cross-group and cross-culture collaboration
  • Must obtain work authorization in country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment

Skills

Required:Policy architecture designExperimentation and ablation studiesLarge-scale trainingSimulation and real-robot testing
Nice to have:Distributed computing
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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