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

Location: San Francisco, CA, US; Palo Alto, CA, US; Seattle, WA, US; New York, NY, US

Department: University Engineering

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.

Note to applicants:

By applying to this role, you will be considered for multiple intern roles open across our various ML teams. Please only apply once within the USA or Canada as multiple applications may delay our recruitment process.

Internships are 12 weeks paid from September 21 - December 11, 2026. Depending on the team, our fall internships will be located either remote or hybrid in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York or Seattle 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. 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

What we’re looking for:

• This role will be on our Visual Search or Applied Science teams. We are looking for candidates with 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.

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.

At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.

Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.

US based applicants only

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

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