Mission and Opportunity:
MRSL is a world-class developer of advanced signal processing, intelligent sensing, and autonomous systems for the U.S. Government. We build software and algorithms that help complex systems perceive, understand, and respond intelligently to their environment. Our technologies are deployed across a broad range of defense applications—including this project focusing on the emerging domain of autonomous space systems—where reliable, mission-critical autonomy can make the difference between success and failure.
This internship is an opportunity to join a mature, high-impact effort already built through approximately 18 months of work by MRSL staff and previous interns. The system has been nominated for a launch program, and the next phase is to continue that work through launch preparation, on-orbit testing, operational support, performance assessment, and iterative improvement. You will not be starting with a toy problem or a disconnected intern project. You will take ownership of meaningful technical work within an existing flight-bound system and help see it through the most important stages of its lifecycle.
What We Are Looking For:
We are looking for an engineering intern who is driven, and excited by difficult technical problems. The strongest candidates will be comfortable learning quickly, working independently when needed, and contributing as part of a multidisciplinary engineering team.
Required Qualifications:
- Working toward or already holding a B.S. or graduate degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Physics, Imaging Science, or a related engineering or science discipline.
- Experience with programming in some combination of Python, C/C++, Java, scripting, and Linux.
- Ability to reason through algorithmic and system-level problems and implement practical solutions in code.
- Strong communication skills, attention to detail, and a willingness to take ownership of assigned work.
- Candidates must be U.S. Citizens and able to meet TS/SCI clearance eligibility requirements.
Bonus - Experience in any of the following:
- ROS 2, robotics middleware, or distributed systems
- ML, RL, agentic AI, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, scikit-learn, or Edge ML
- Autonomous or real-time sensing systems, embedded processing, or sensor fusion
- Signal or image processing, detection and estimation, classification, or spectral analysis
- Docker, Git workflows, CI/CD, automated testing, and software validation
- Space systems, flight software, or operations involving embedded or real-time constraints
Eligibility and Internship Details:
This is a paid internship available during the Fall and Spring terms and offered only at MRSL's Sarasota, Florida office. A housing allowance is provided. The position is suitable for a traditional intern, co-op student, recent graduate seeking hands-on experience, or currently enrolled student able to work daytime hours around a class schedule.
Why This Internship is Different:
- Mission impact: contribute to technology supporting U.S. Government space and defense missions.
- Real ownership: take responsibility for work that becomes part of a functioning operational system.
- Flight opportunity: help improve software that is expected to launch and operate in a real mission environment.
- Full lifecycle exposure: experience development, validation, launch preparation, testing, operations, and issue resolution.
- Career path: MRSL's internship program is one of the primary ways we identify and hire future full-time engineers.
What You Will Do:
- Support pre-launch integration, readiness, and validation of autonomous sensing software.
- Support post-launch testing and operations, including monitoring, metrics, and dashboards.
- Tune, evaluate, and optimize machine learning and reinforcement learning models.
- Perform model validation, system verification, and end-to-end mission testing.
- Analyze customer feedback, anomalies, and system issues to identify root causes and develop resolutions.
- Extend intelligent sensing, autonomy, and decision-making capabilities using modern software and AI techniques.
- Collaborate with experienced engineers on system design and production-quality software development.
- Document findings, communicate results, and translate lessons learned into improved operational capability.
Technologies and Technical Areas:
- ROS 2 and distributed autonomy architectures
- Machine Learning (ML), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and agentic systems
- Python, C/C++, Linux, and embedded systems
- Signal processing, image processing, computer vision, and sensor fusion
- Git, Docker, CI/CD, automated testing, and collaborative software development
- Operational dashboards, metrics pipelines, model monitoring, and data analysis
- Flight software, real-time systems, and edge processing
