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

Pinterest • San Francisco, NY

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Millions of people around the world come to Pinterest to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. Pinterest's mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. AI is a powerful partner that augments creativity and amplifies impact at Pinterest. As a machine learning intern in the Advance Technology Group, you will be exposed to a full spectrum of ML product development. The team focuses on developing cutting-edge technologies for Pinterest’s visual understanding modules and recommender systems. Interns will conduct research applicable across Pinterest engineering teams, engage in external collaborations and mentoring, and have opportunities to deploy features to hundreds of millions of users or conduct research for paper submissions. This is a 12-week paid fall internship program, available remotely or in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, or New York offices, from September 21 - December 11, 2026. Applicants will be considered for multiple intern roles across various ML teams within the USA or Canada.

Requirements

• Experience in Computer Vision, Visual Search, User Understanding, Recommendation Systems, Reinforcement Learning, ML efficiency optimization, Generative AI, and LLMs.
• Ability to legally work full time (40 hours/week) from September-December 2026
• Working towards a PhD degree in Computer Science, ML, NLP, Statistics, Information Sciences or related field
• Mastery of at least one systems language (Java, C++, Python) and one ML framework (Tensorflow, Pytorch, MLFlow)
• Proficiency with AI-native engineering, including the design of agent-friendly codebases.
• High degree of autonomy in learning new agent-first development tools.
• Strong critical thinking when working with AI-generated suggestions, with a clear approach to validating correctness, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Comfort iterating on prompts, refining workflows, and adapting AI-assisted approaches based on the problem, context, and constraints.
• Experience in research and in solving analytical problems
• Strong communicator and team player.
• Being able to find solutions for open-ended problems.

Nice To Haves

• Publications in machine learning, AI, data science, data analytics, statistics, or related technical fields
• Strong passion for research and for answering hard questions with research
• Passion for applied ML and the Pinterest product

Responsibilities

• 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 hands-on experience with production ML systems, including algorithmic research, infrastructure, data engineering, training, inference, and product, to deliver innovative solutions. You will be exposed to full-stack production ML systems.
• Leverage frontier AI tools and agents to accelerate engineering implementation, including prototyping and experimentation work.
• Validate AI-generated outputs through testing, code review, and critical thinking, ensuring solutions are accurate, maintainable, secure, and aligned with team standards.
• Use AI to better understand unfamiliar code, investigate bugs, and summarize technical context or documentation.
• Contribute in cutting-edge research in machine learning and artificial intelligence that can be applied to Pinterest problems
• Write clean, efficient, and sustainable code
• Take proactive ownership over the completion and quality of your tasks and project with minimal guidance from your mentor, manager, and peers

Benefits

• Meaningful Work: Contribute to projects that impact millions of users worldwide.
• Mentorship: Learn from and be guided by experienced engineers and researchers in the field.
• Growth and Development: Participate in professional development workshops and networking events to build your skills and connections.
• Paid internship
• Base salary range for this position

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees