NVIDIA 2026 Internships: PhD Autonomous Vehicles Research

Details

NVIDIA is offering 2026 research-focused internships in Autonomous Vehicles for PhD students. By submitting your resume you express interest in one of the Autonomous Vehicles research internships; applications are reviewed on an ongoing basis. Interns work with NVIDIA research teams to design and implement cutting-edge techniques in vehicle autonomy, collaborate with internal and external researchers, and transfer research to product groups (prototypes, patents, products, and/or published research).

Responsibilities

• Design and implement cutting-edge techniques in the field of vehicle autonomy.
• Collaborate with team members, other teams, and external researchers.
• Transfer research results to product groups (deliverables may include prototypes, patents, products, and publishing original research).

Requirements

• Must be actively enrolled in a university pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field for the entire duration of the internship.
• Depending on the specific internship, prior experience or knowledge may include programming skills and technologies such as: Python, C++, CUDA, and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc.).
• Strong background in research with publications at top conferences.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience with large-scale model training is a plus.

Potential research areas (examples listed in the posting)

• Next-Generation AV Architectures
  • Chain-of-Thought reasoning, mixture-of-experts, diffusion-LLMs, diffusion-based trajectory decoding
• Novel policy training strategies
  • Closed-loop training, off-policy RL, online RL, enforcing consistency
• Foundation and multimodal models
  • Vision-language models, multimodal reasoning, spatial multimodal models, modality alignment, model scaling, synthetic data
• Inference efficiency
  • Inference optimizations (e.g., parallel decoding, speculative decoding), token representations, model distillation
• Simulation and behavior modeling
  • Digital twins, scenario generation, world models, behavior/traffic modeling
• End-to-end AV systems
  • Mapless driving, world representations, beyond imitation learning, safety-aware end-to-end models
• Perception and representation learning
  • Multi-modal sensor fusion, 2D/3D detection, segmentation, depth estimation, scene understanding, neural representations
• Safe and trustworthy autonomous systems
  • Principled robustness, model explainability, Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), verification & validation of safety-critical AI systems, trustworthy AI/ML for autonomy and robotics
• Data strategies and benchmarking for AV

Compensation & Benefits

• Internship hourly rate: 30 USD - 94 USD (standard pay varies by position, location, year in school, degree, and experience).
• Interns are eligible for NVIDIA intern benefits (link provided in original posting).

Additional notes

• Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.
• NVIDIA is committed to diversity and is an equal opportunity employer.