What are the responsibilities and job description for the Robotics Engineering Intern position at Cosmic Robotics?
Robotics Engineering Intern
Location: San Francisco, CA (full time, in-person)
Company Overview
Our mission is to accelerate the construction of critical infrastructure on Earth while pioneering technologies to enable humanity to build beyond Earth. Starting with Cosmic-1 – a system that installs solar panels 10x faster than today’s methods, helping us transition to a clean energy future and laying the groundwork for the future of autonomous construction.
The Role
As a Robotics Engineering Intern, you will join the team as a full-fledged contributor: designing, building, and shipping core technologies that operate on live customer projects in the field. You’ll work with us to tackle meaningful, challenging problems across hardware, software, and system integration.
This is a rare opportunity to:
Location: San Francisco, CA (full time, in-person)
Company Overview
Our mission is to accelerate the construction of critical infrastructure on Earth while pioneering technologies to enable humanity to build beyond Earth. Starting with Cosmic-1 – a system that installs solar panels 10x faster than today’s methods, helping us transition to a clean energy future and laying the groundwork for the future of autonomous construction.
The Role
As a Robotics Engineering Intern, you will join the team as a full-fledged contributor: designing, building, and shipping core technologies that operate on live customer projects in the field. You’ll work with us to tackle meaningful, challenging problems across hardware, software, and system integration.
This is a rare opportunity to:
- Work on hard, meaningful problems that impact the future of infrastructure and energy.
- Collaborate with a world-class team from NASA, SpaceX, Google, Built Robotics, and others.
- Rapidly grow, learn, and lead within a quickly scaling company.
- Contribute directly to the development of mission-critical robotic systems used in active customer deployments
- Participate in rigorous testing, validation, and documentation to ensure safety and reliability
- Collaborate closely across hardware and software teams to diagnose and resolve system-level issues
- Support field testing, data collection, and on-site system bring-up
- Communicate progress clearly and take ownership of deliverables
- Design and prototype mechanical, electrical, or mechatronic components for next-generation autonomous construction systems
- Execute hardware-software integration, subsystem bring-up, and reliability testing
- Build test rigs, perform hands-on debugging, and support iteration on structures, sensor, actuator, and compute subsystems
- Develop across the full robotics software stack—from low-level drivers to high-level autonomy and application logic
- Contribute to perception, navigation, planning, machine learning, controls, and real-time system components
- Push production code to live robots operating in the field and support iterative testing in simulation and real-world environments
- Strong fundamentals in engineering, robotics, algorithms, or systems development
- Demonstrated proficiency in key technical skills:
- Software: C , Python, Linux, algorithms, and systems programming
- Hardware: mechanical/electrical design, CAD, prototyping, test and measurement, and mechatronics
- Ability to thrive in fast-paced environments and deliver high-quality work under tight timelines
- Excellent communication and teamwork skills
- Passion for building autonomous systems that operate in the field
- Experience in engineering clubs or project teams such as: robotics teams, Formula SAE, rocketry or autonomous drone/vehicle teams
- Participation in robotics, ML, or hardware research projects
- Personal robotics or engineering projects (e.g., GitHub, competitions, custom builds)
- Familiarity with ROS 2, simulation tools, or robotics frameworks
- Previous internship experience