Software Engineer Intern​/Co-op

Phlux Industrial Robotics Software Engineer Intern

Phlux Industrial robots are fast, heavy, and unforgiving, so they get fenced off. The devices that guard them — light curtains, laser scanners, safety mats — mostly protect a flat plane or a patch of floor, which forces a big rectangular cage around the machine, eats floor space, and halts production every time somebody steps too close. We build a 3D safety sensor that changes the shape of that problem, literally.

It monitors a programmable three-dimensional protection zone around a robot, detects in real time when someone enters it, and drives safety outputs wired into the customer's safety controller. Safety itself is table stakes — every plant already has to meet it. What a 3D zone adds is flexibility: cells shaped to the actual work instead of a rectangle, people and robots far closer together, less floor space, and far fewer stoppages.

Getting there means solving a hard set of problems at once: optical sensing, real-time detection on constrained hardware, precise timing, calibration, and designing something that has to keep behaving correctly even when parts of it fail. We're a small, NSF-funded team in Pittsburgh. We've deployed units, tested them with real customers, and have more in front of us — this isn't a research project hunting for an application.

Your role

You'd work on the software that surrounds the sensor: the applications engineers use to configure and commission it, the visualizations that show what the device is actually seeing, the services that move data off the hardware, and the tooling we use to test all of it. Some of that is polished product. Some of it is a rough prototype built to answer a question in a week.

Because the team is small, you wouldn't be siloed. You'd work alongside engineers across mechanical, optical, firmware, and software — often on the same problem in the same room. Most interns and co-ops spend a term on a walled-off side project that gets archived when they leave. You'd be in the middle of how the product actually gets built, and you'd see the whole path from an idea to something running on real hardware in front of a customer.

What you could work on

Depending on where you're strongest and what we need at the time, this could include:

• Desktop and web applications that engineers use to set up, monitor, and troubleshoot the sensor
• Real-time 3D visualization — rendering sensor data and geometry so people can see what the device sees
• Device communication — services that move data between hardware and applications, including binary protocol work
• R&D and prototyping — quick exploratory code for things we're evaluating: new sensors, embedded hardware, approaches we want to try before committing to them. Some of it turns into product; some of it answers a question and gets thrown away
• Data pipelines and analytics tooling for turning raw sensor output into something people can reason about
• Test tooling and automation — fixtures, simulators, and the harnesses that let us verify behavior without hardware in the loop
• Documentation and written procedures, so what you build survives you

We'd shape your first project around what you're actually good at — figuring that out is part of what the interview is for. Whatever it ends up being, it's real work that ships, not something invented to keep a co-op busy.

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

- 3rd or 4th year undergraduate, or Master's student, in Computer Science, Computer/Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field

You can write working code yourself — strong in at least one of Python, Type Script, C, C++, or Rust. Most of what you'd write here is Python and Type Script, but real depth in a systems language transfers fine, and you'd pick up the rest as you go

You can read unfamiliar code and judge it. Handed a 500-line file you've never seen, you can say what it does — and whether it's doing it correctly. Code that compiles and passes its tests can still be wrong, and noticing that is a large part of this job

You know what "right" should look like before you see it. You can hold a picture of how something ought to behave, then recognize when what's in…