About the Company
Silana is a deep tech robotics startup automating garment manufacture. We design and develop robotic systems that handle soft, deformable materials in production environments - a problem at the frontier of industrial automation. If you want to work on hard robotics problems with real-world impact, this is the place.
About the Role
We're looking for a Robotics Engineering Intern to join our engineering team in Manhattan. You'll work directly alongside our robotics and controls engineers on systems that integrate robotic arms, computer vision, and industrial automation hardware. This is a hands-on role - you'll be writing code that runs on physical machines, not simulations. This internship is best suited for someone with real-world experience in robotic manipulation and industrial automation, as opposed to mobile robotics or simulation / academic research.
Responsibilities
• Develop and maintain ROS 2 nodes for robotic arm control, motion planning, and sensor integration
• Work with Universal Robots cobots and integrate them into multi-subsystem automation cells
• Interface ROS 2 with industrial automation components including PLCs and EtherCAT-based I/O
• Test, debug, and validate robotic behavior on physical hardware in our workshop
• Write clean, documented, and maintainable code within a collaborative engineering team
• Participate in integration testing and system commissioning for customer deployments
Qualifications
• Currently pursuing or recently completed a degree in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field
Required Skills
• Strong working knowledge of ROS 2 (Humble or later), comfortable with nodes, topics, services, actions, launch files, and lifecycle management
• Hands-on experience with robotic arms (UR, KUKA, Fanuc, ABB, or similar) in a lab or industrial context
• Proficiency in Python and/or C++ for robotics applications
• Familiarity with motion planning frameworks (MoveIt 2, or equivalent)
• Understanding of coordinate frames, transforms (tf2), and URDF/Xacro
• Comfortable working in Linux (Ubuntu) environments and using Git for version control
Preferred Skills
• Experience with industrial communication protocols (EtherCAT, Modbus, OPC UA)
• Exposure to PLC-based automation systems (Beckhoff TwinCAT, Siemens, Allen-Bradley)
• Background in computer vision or depth sensing for manipulation tasks
• Familiarity with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, or embedded compute platforms (NVIDIA Jetson)
• Prior internship or project work in a manufacturing, warehouse, or industrial automation setting
Pay range and compensation package
This is a paid internship
Duration: 10 weeks (June - August 2026)
Full-time, 40 hours/week, on-site in Manhattan's Garment District
Must be authorized to work in the U.S.
