Help the Ferret make sense of the world underground.

You’ll write code, work with sensors and build experiments that help our robots see, map and understand their surroundings.

About Puralink

There’s an entire world beneath your feet. We’re building the robots to explore it.

Pipes carry the water we drink, keep cities running and support everything from energy production to data centres. They’re essential, often difficult to access, and surprisingly poorly understood. We’re changing that.

Puralink is building the operating system for the world’s pipes. Our autonomous robot, the Ferret, gets inside infrastructure to inspect and map it. Our software platform, PuralinkOS, turns what it finds into intelligence that helps customers understand their assets and make better decisions.

For the Ferret, perception is central to the job. Understanding its surroundings helps it navigate and collect useful information about the infrastructure it explores. Underground pipes make that an interesting engineering challenge: confined spaces, changing lighting and surfaces that don’t always make life easy for a camera.

At our Mascot HQ, you’ll work alongside the engineers tackling those challenges and help turn ideas into systems we can test on real hardware.

The role

This internship sits across software and hardware. You might spend the morning testing a computer vision algorithm and the afternoon building a rig to find out whether it works beyond the dataset.

You’ll work with sensor data, develop perception pipelines and help integrate them into our robotic platform. You’ll also get hands-on with mounting sensors, calibration, collecting data and running experiments.





This role suits someone who enjoys coding and wants to understand what happens when that code meets a real sensor, on a real robot, in an imperfect setting.

What you’ll do

- Help the Ferret see. Develop and test perception algorithms for our robotic platform.
- Get to know the sensors. Work with data from sensors such as RGB cameras, depth sensors, LiDAR and IMUs.
- Build the experiment. Design and assemble test rigs to evaluate sensors and perception systems.
- Get hands-on with hardware. Set up, mount and calibrate sensors for testing.
- Collect useful data. Run real-world experiments and capture well-organised datasets that the team can use.
- Find out what’s actually working. Analyse results, investigate failures and improve system performance.
- Make it work on the robot. Help integrate, debug and optimise perception pipelines alongside software, hardware and controls engineers.

What success looks like

You’ve built experiments that answer useful engineering questions, collected data the team can trust and helped improve a perception pipeline.

You can explain what you tested, what you learned and what you changed as a result. You’ve also become more confident moving between code, sensors and physical hardware, including when the results don’t match your expectations.

What we’re looking for

You’re studying Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related field, and you’re curious about how robots understand their surroundings.

You’ll bring





- A basic understanding of computer vision and/or robotics
- Programming skills in Python and C
- Familiarity with OpenCV or similar libraries
- An interest in both software and physical systems
- The ability to design and assemble easy hardware test setups
- A thoughtful approach to testing, documenting results and investigating problems
- Initiative to try things, ask good questions and learn from the team

University projects, robotics clubs and personal experiments all count. We’d love to hear about something you’ve built, especially what happened when you tested it.

Nice to have

- Familiarity with ROS (Robot Operating System)
- Knowledge of SLAM, sensor fusion or 3D perception
- Experience with 3D printing, basic electronics or other prototyping tools
- An understanding of sensor calibration and experimental design

You don’t need to tick every box. These are areas you’ll have opportunities to learn more about.

Why spend your summer at Puralink?

See your code meet the physical world. Work with real sensors and robots, and learn from what happens when you put them to the test.

Build the whole experiment. Get experience designing, assembling and validating the setups behind good engineering decisions.

Learn across disciplines. Work alongside experienced software, hardware and controls engineers, with mentorship as you develop your skills.

Contribute to a real engineering challenge. Help build technology that gives customers a better understanding of infrastructure they can’t easily see or reach.

Join us at our HQ. We’re based in Mascot, Sydney, close to Mascot station.

Reporting to Matt Spender | Robotics & Perception Engineer @ Puralink

📌 Summer Perception Engineering Internship (Robotics) (Sydney)
🏢 Puralink
📍 Sydney