PhD Machine Learning Internship 2027 (USA)

About the Role

Pinterest's PhD Machine Learning Internship offers hands-on research and development experience building personalized experiences and large-scale recommendation systems. Interns conduct research applicable across engineering teams, with opportunities for external collaboration and mentoring.

Research areas include image recognition, user modeling, recommender systems, search, ads, ranking, natural language processing, neural networks, personalization, graph representation learning, and big data analytics.

Internship Details

• Paid, 12-week internship for US-based applicants only.
• Start-date options: May 17–August 6, 2027, or June 14–September 3, 2027.
• Depending on the team, internships are remote or hybrid in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, or New York.
• In-person collaboration may require living within commuting distance of a Pinterest office.
• Stated compensation: $12,100 monthly.

Responsibilities

• Lead a project from start to finish, contributing machine learning and AI research applicable to Pinterest problems.
• Gain hands-on experience across production ML systems, including algorithmic research, infrastructure, data engineering, training, inference, and product.
• Use frontier AI tools and agents to accelerate implementation, prototyping, and experimentation.
• Validate AI-generated outputs through testing, code review, and critical thinking to ensure accuracy, maintainability, security, and alignment with team standards.
• Use AI to understand unfamiliar code, investigate bugs, and summarize technical context or documentation.
• Write clean, efficient, sustainable code.
• Proactively own task and project completion and quality with minimal guidance from mentors, managers, and peers.

Qualifications

• Working toward a PhD in Computer Science, ML, NLP, Statistics, Information Sciences, or a related field.
• Proficiency in at least one systems language—Java, C++, or Python—or one ML framework—TensorFlow, PyTorch, or MLflow.
• Proficiency with AI-native engineering, including designing agent-friendly codebases.
• High autonomy in learning new agent-first development tools.
• Strong critical thinking about AI-generated suggestions and a clear approach to validating correctness, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Comfort iterating on prompts, refining workflows, and adapting AI-assisted approaches to problems, context, and constraints.
• Research experience and experience solving analytical problems.
• Strong communication, teamwork, and ability to solve open-ended problems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Publications in machine learning, AI, data science, data analytics, statistics, or related technical fields.
• Interest in research and applying ML to impactful real-world Pinterest product problems.

Development Opportunities

• Work on projects affecting millions of users.
• Receive mentorship from experienced engineers and researchers.
• Participate in professional development workshops and networking events.

Application and Interview Guidelines

• One application provides consideration for multiple internships across ML teams. Apply only once within the USA or Canada; multiple applications may delay recruitment.
• Interviews explore foundational skills and collaboration with AI. Candidates must be able to explain their approach and reasoning.
• Application and hiring-process information must be true, accurate, and complete. False statements, omissions, or misrepresentations may lead to disqualification or termination after hire.
• Applicants may request medical or religious accommodations during the application process.