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

Pinterest•Palo Alto, CA

10h•Hybrid

About The Position

Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product. Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible. At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI. Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here. As a machine learning intern in our Advance Technology Group at Pinterest, 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. You'll conduct research that can be applied across Pinterest engineering teams and engage in external collaborations and mentoring, while also having opportunities to deploy features to hundreds of millions of users or conduct research applicable for paper submissions. We offer a 12-week fall internship program remotely or in our San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, or New York offices.

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.

Stand Out From the Crowd

Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.

Upload and Match Resume