Machine Learning/AI Scientist PhD Intern, Winter 2027

Netflix•Los Gatos, CA

6d•$40 - $85•Onsite

About The Position

Netflix is a leading global entertainment service with over 300 million paid memberships in over 190 countries. Machine learning research at Netflix is crucial for improving various aspects of the business, including personalization, member and title understanding, creative tooling, system optimization, and developing innovative tools. Our research covers diverse areas such as recommender systems, reinforcement learning, computer vision, natural language processing, optimization, causality, and operations research, supported by robust machine learning infrastructure. This internship offers a unique opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge ML research in a dynamic environment.

Requirements

Currently enrolled student pursuing a PhD (2nd–4th year preferred) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, Data Science, Economics, Computational Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Cognitive Science, or a related field.
Available to work onsite, 40 hours per week in Los Gatos.
Domain expertise in one or more of the following areas: Personalization & Recommender Systems, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision (CV), Reliable ML, Causal ML, Agentic AI, Multimodal Data, Model Optimization & Efficiency.
Experience programming in at least one language (Python, Java, Scala, or C/C++).
Familiarity developing ML models with common frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) and training on GPUs.
Familiarity with distributed training/inference paradigms and frameworks (e.g., DDP, FSDP, HSDP, DeepSpeed).
Familiarity with end-to-end ML pipelines (training or production deployment) and common challenges like explainability.
Curious, self-motivated, and excited about solving open-ended challenges at Netflix.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Publications in top conferences or journals (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, RecSys, ACL/EMNLP/NAACL, AAAI, CIKM, WWW, UAI, CVPR).
Comfort with software engineering best practices (version control, testing, code review).

Responsibilities

Contribute to machine learning research projects at Netflix.
Develop and implement machine learning models and algorithms.
Collaborate with research teams on various ML domains.
Potentially work on projects related to personalization, NLP, computer vision, reliable ML, causal ML, agentic AI, multimodal data, or model optimization.