# PhD Research Intern — Learned End-to-End Driving and Actuation at Zendar

- Company: Zendar
- What the company does: Backed by Y Combinator.
- Company website: http://www.zendar.io
- Type: Startups
- Level: Internship
- Location: Berkeley, CA
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $55/hr (USD)
- Posted: 2026-10-23
- Apply by: 2026-12-07
- Apply: https://zendar.breezy.hr/p/16cbc991ca25-phd-research-intern-learned-end-to-end-driving-and-actuation?utm_source=1752vc&utm_medium=careers
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/zendar-phd-research-intern-learned-end-to-end-driving-and-actuation/

## About the role

You will own one research direction on the production planner, working with the researchers who ship it, on real fleet data, and present your results to the people who decide what ships. What a successful planner means to us, and what we will measure you against: Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.

## What they're looking for

- Understands what is missing: finds the mechanism behind a driving planner's failures and shows which gap matters before changing anything
- Handles the long tail, never gets stuck and knows how to get itself unstuck: agile, it commits, launches, re-plans and recovers on its own
- Collision- and comfort-aware, and generalizes across structured environments (roads, lanes, intersections) and unstructured ones (lots, yards, sites, robotics settings)
- Knows how to test and evaluate actuation and planning pipelines: open-loop, closed-loop and on-vehicle, with metrics that predict road behavior
- Production quality, not a proof of concept: tested code, reproducible results, behavior that holds across checkpoints and scenes. This is our standard and our measure of success


Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/zendar-phd-research-intern-learned-end-to-end-driving-and-actuation/