Perception Intern (Fall 2026)

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 onboard and offboard (cloud-side) perception systems that inform, validate, and augment our onboard autonomy. From generating rich 3D and semantic priors from aerial survey data to learning customer preferences and terrain features at scale, your work will help define how we prepare Zipline aircraft to perform mission-critical deliveries in complex, real-world environments. The Role You'll dive into ML model experimentation, evaluation and integration - pushing the boundaries of our current offboard perception system. 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 heterogeneous sources of data (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. Masters and PhD students are also eligible. A proven history of quality ML research, reflected by publications in conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, CoRL, RSS, etc. Specific expertise in areas such as multi view depth estimation, semantic segmentation, generative modeling, etc. Proficiency with deep learning frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow. Experience writing 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 or Dallas office. We will host our Fall 2026 interns from September to December. The hourly rate for this internship is $50 per hour. Additional benefits may inclu