Machine Learning Intern – Visual Understanding, Recommender Systems

Job Description

PhD Fall Machine Learning Intern (ATG — Visual, Multimodal, and Recommender Systems) | Pinterest

The Tone:
This is an internship at Pinterest, located remotely or in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, or New York. Pinterest is a platform where millions find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities, and plan for memories. The company’s mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. AI is a powerful partner at Pinterest, augmenting creativity and amplifying impact, and this role focuses on developing cutting-edge technologies for visual understanding modules and recommender systems. Through this internship, you will be exposed to a full spectrum of ML product development, from research to deployment, impacting hundreds of millions of users.

The TL;DR
• Role: Internship
• Type: Full-time
• Location: Remote, Hybrid, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, or New York
• Pay: $12,100 monthly
• Team: ATG (Advance Technology Group) — Visual, Multimodal, and Recommender Systems, Visual Search, or Applied Science teams
• Mission: Develop and launch new user features using unique internal datasets and ML techniques, contribute cutting-edge research, and gain hands-on experience with production ML systems.
• Tech Stack: Java, C++, Python, Tensorflow, Pytorch, MLFlow

What You’ll Actually Do
• Develop: Develop and launch new user features using unique internal datasets and ML techniques, especially in recommendation systems, computer vision, representation learning, generative AI, and responsible AI.
• Gain Experience: Gain hands-on experience with production ML systems, including algorithmic research, infrastructure, data engineering, training, inference, and product, to deliver innovative solutions.
• Accelerate Engineering: Leverage frontier AI tools and agents to accelerate engineering implementation, including prototyping and experimentation work.
• Validate Outputs: Validate AI-generated outputs through testing, code review, and critical thinking, ensuring solutions are accurate, maintainable, secure, and aligned with team standards.
• Contribute Research: Contribute in cutting-edge research in machine learning and artificial intelligence that can be applied to Pinterest problems.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Working towards a PhD degree in Computer Science, ML, NLP, Statistics, Information Sciences, or a related field.
• Experience: Experience in research and solving analytical problems, with a focus on Computer Vision, Visual Search, User Understanding, Recommendation Systems, Reinforcement Learning, ML efficiency optimization, Generative AI, or LLMs.
• Skills: Mastery of at least one systems language (Java, C++, Python) and one ML framework (Tensorflow, Pytorch, MLFlow); proficiency with AI-native engineering and agent-friendly codebases; strong critical thinking when validating AI-generated suggestions.
• Bonus: Publications in machine learning, AI, data science, statistics, or related technical fields, and a strong passion for research and applied ML on Pinterest’s product.