PhD Fall Machine Learning Intern; ATG - Visual, Multimodal, and Recommender Systems

About the Position

As a machine learning intern in our Advanced 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 will conduct research that can be applied across Pinterest engineering teams, engage in external collaborations and mentoring, and have opportunities to deploy features to hundreds of millions of users or publish research.

Internship details: 12‑week paid program from September 21 to December 11 2026, offered remotely or in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, or New York offices.

• 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.
• 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 to 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 projects with minimal guidance from your mentor, manager, and peers.

• 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, able to find solutions for open‑ended problems.

• 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.

• 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.

• We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we’re not always working in an office, but we gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
• This role may require you to be located near an office for in‑person collaboration and therefore may need to be located a commuter’s distance from one of our Pinterest offices.

We believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, disability, medical condition, genetic information, or criminal history, consistent with all applicable laws. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.

The salary for this position is $12,100 monthly.