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

About Pinterest 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. About the Internship 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. The internship runs for 12 weeks, paid from September 21 to December 11, 2026. Depending on the team, our fall internships will be located either remote or hybrid in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle or New York offices. What You’ll Do 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. What We’re Looking For 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 to December 2026. Working toward 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. Preferred Qualifications 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. Why Intern at Pinterest? 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. In‑Office Requirement Statement We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we’re not always working in an office, but we continue to 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 commutable distance from one of our Pinterest offices. Salary The salary for this position is $12,100 monthly. US Based Applicants Only US based applicants only. Our Commitment to Inclusion Pinterest is an equal‑opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition or genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support. #J-18808-Ljbffr Pinterest