How competitive are internships at Figure/1X/Apptronik/Agility right now?

[zoeanderson]

Not sure if this has been discussed before, but here goes. How much ML background a controls role actually requires varies a lot by company and team - some whole-body control positions remain heavily classical-optimization-focused, while others increasingly expect familiarity with reinforcement learning or imitation learning even for what used to be a purely classical-controls job. The common academic path into this field is a master's or conversion course in robotics or machine learning, followed by an internship or research role at a known lab or company - a PhD is common but increasingly not strictly required for industry roles, especially on the applied engineering side. Interested in both agreement and pushback here.

[cynthia.muller]

@zoeanderson From hands-on experience, Companies like Figure, 1X, Apptronik, and Agility Robotics are reportedly pulling senior ROS, controls, and learning engineers directly out of warehouse-automation and industrial-robotics roles - a sign of real talent competition between adjacent industries, not just fresh grads entering the field.

[dubois35]

@cynthia.muller Worth being a little skeptical of the marketing angle here. A whole-body control engineer's day-to-day work is a mix of formulating and tuning constrained optimization problems, debugging why a controller behaves differently on hardware than in simulation, and a surprising amount of time spent on numerical stability and solver performance rather than pure algorithm design.

[barbara.jones]

@dubois35 Here's what I know on this: Robotics engineers in the US were reportedly seeing $150k-$205k total comp at mid-level and $205k-$300k at senior level in 2026, with humanoid- and foundation-model-specialist roles clearing $280k-$475k - a meaningful premium over general robotics/automation roles.

[erik_novi]

This raises a question for me - Internship competitiveness at the well-known humanoid companies has increased sharply as the field's visibility has grown, with the applicant pool now including not just robotics students but a lot of general CS/ML students drawn in by the sector's high profile. Transitioning from industrial automation into humanoid-specific roles is a increasingly common and viable path, since a lot of the underlying skills (motion control, safety systems, real-time software) transfer directly, even though the specific dynamics and learned-control components are new. Makes me wonder how this looks in another five years.

[diego.moore6]

@erik_novi This raises a question for me - Active employers hiring specifically for humanoid-relevant roles span both established robotics companies (Shadow Robot, Engineered Arts, PAL Robotics) and the newer venture-funded players (Figure, 1X, Apptronik, Sanctuary AI, Boston Dynamics' electric Atlas program) - each with different team sizes, cultures, and hardware-vs-software emphasis.

[emilyperez]

Agreed, and I'd add: A strong, well-documented personal project (even a modest DIY build or a solid simulation-based RL project) reportedly carries real weight in hiring for this field, partly because the field is young enough that a demonstrated hands-on track record can meaningfully substitute for a less-relevant formal credential.

[diego.moore6]

Follow-up question though - In the UK, base salaries for robotics roles reportedly range from around £50,000 for new graduates up to roughly £200,000 for senior whole-body-control or reinforcement-learning specialists - a notably wide band reflecting how specialized the top end of the field has become.

[sarah.santos3]

Just to be precise about one thing: A field-deployment or reliability engineer's day-to-day work leans much more toward diagnosing real-world failure patterns, managing spare-parts logistics, and working directly with the customer site than toward algorithm development - a genuinely different role than a lot of new grads expect going in.

[ashley_flor]

I dealt with almost this exact situation. 24/7 factory-pilot support roles (the engineers keeping a deployed fleet running through real shifts) reportedly carry a real burnout risk, since they combine the unpredictability of early-stage hardware with the operational pressure of a live production environment.