robotic systems engineer intern

Start Date: ASAP

About Us

Mundane is a venture-backed seed-stage robot learning startup founded by a team of Stanford researchers and builders. We’re deploying a massive fleet of humanoid robots to perform mundane tasks in commercial environments, collecting data to build the next generation of embodied intelligence. We’re a fast-paced, execution-driven team of engineers, roboticists, and dreamers.

About the Role

As a Robotics Development Intern, you will work alongside our robotics engineers to build, integrate, and debug critical components of our humanoid robot systems. This role sits at the intersection of robot hardware, controls, and software infrastructure, and is ideal for someone who enjoys hands-on lab work and system-level debugging.

You will help bring up hardware subsystems, integrate sensors and actuators, develop ROS 2 tooling, and support robotic arm control development. This role emphasizes practical robotics engineering — from wiring and calibration to debugging distributed ROS systems.

You’ll collaborate closely with engineers across controls, hardware, and autonomy teams to support rapid iteration on robot capabilities and infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Assist with hardware bring-up, integration, and debugging of robot subsystems including sensors, actuators, and compute systems.
• Integrate and troubleshoot actuators and sensors, including calibration, signal validation, and fault isolation.
• Develop and maintain ROS 2 nodes, launch files, and tooling supporting robot behaviors and infrastructure.
• Work with engineers to implement and test robot arm controllers, including PID tuning and compensation techniques.
• Contribute to robot modeling using URDF/Xacro and validate robot kinematics within ROS-based workflows.
• Support development of robot system debugging tools including logging, rosbag analysis, and visualization in RViz.
• Assist with robot bring-up in the lab, including wiring, hardware validation, and iterative troubleshooting.
• Work on Linux-based robot compute systems, helping debug networking, device interfaces, and runtime issues.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to support rapid prototyping, testing, and iteration of robotic systems.

Qualifications (Must Have)

• Hands-on experience building, integrating, and debugging hardware systems (robotics or electromechanical products).
• Proven ability to integrate and troubleshoot actuators and sensors, including bring-up, calibration, signal validation, and fault isolation.
• Strong fundamentals in mechatronics, including motors/drives, sensors, mechanisms, and basic control concepts.
• Experience developing with ROS 2, including nodes, topics/services/actions, launch files, TF, rosbag workflows, debugging tools, and RViz.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or C for robotics systems and tooling.
• Understanding of robot kinematics and dynamics, including experience working with URDF/Xacro and robot models.
• Comfortable performing hands-on lab work, including wiring, hardware bring-up, and iterative troubleshooting.
• Experience working with Linux-based compute systems, including development workflows, networking, device interfaces, and debugging tools.
• Experience with robotic arm control, including developing controllers and tuning (PID or impedance control), along with compensation techniques such as friction, gravity, backlash, and feedforward.

Nice to Have

• Experience building robotics simulations using tools such as MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, or similar simulators.
• Experience with signal processing techniques, including filtering, observers, or Kalman filtering.
• Working knowledge of common robotics communication interfaces and protocols such as CAN, USB, GMSL, Ethernet, or EtherCAT.
• Experience working with real-time Linux kernels, including deterministic scheduling, latency/jitter measurement, and debugging timing issues.

What You’ll Get

• Hands-on experience building and deploying real humanoid robot systems.
• The opportunity to work across the full robotics stack — hardware, controls, simulation, and software infrastructure.
• Mentorship from experienced roboticists and engineers working on large-scale robot learning systems.
• A fast-paced environment where you can see your work running on robots quickly.
• Early exposure to a startup scaling embodied intelligence in the real world.

Perks: Competitive salary equity, flexible PTO, legendary merch, coffee, robots, sauna & cold plunge (pending).