Applied AI/ML Scientist, Intern - Winter 2027

About Faire

Faire is a technology wholesale platform connecting independent retailers with brands through technology, data, and machine learning.

About the Role

Join the Applied AI/ML Science team's Shipping and Fulfillment group for a Winter 2027 internship. The team builds models for shipping costs and delivery estimates, including models that understand products from images and text.

Responsibilities

Own a focused project in one of these areas:

• Predicting order packing: Build models that learn from individual items and how items combine in a cart to anticipate how an order will be packed.
• Recommending better packing: Develop models using product images, text, and historical packing outcomes to recommend packing that reduces shipping costs and improves efficiency.
• Understanding catalog products: Train multimodal deep learning models to infer weight, size, and shape from images, text, and other catalog signals.

Across projects, you will:

• Survey research literature and existing approaches to identify promising ideas.
• Prototype and train models offline, benchmarking against current methods.
• Turn the strongest approach into a working implementation.
• Collaborate with Applied Scientists and ML Engineers to test against live traffic.
• Present findings and recommendations to the team.

Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in or recently graduated from a Master's or PhD program in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Hands-on experience building deep learning models, for example with PyTorch, including fine-tuning pretrained models or working with embeddings; image and/or text experience is ideal.
• Familiarity with gradient-boosted trees and other tabular machine learning methods.
• Strong Python and SQL skills.
• Ability to read research papers and translate promising ideas into working code.
• Solid grounding in statistics and model evaluation, including benchmarking against strong baselines and estimating uncertainty.
• Comfort working with noisy or incomplete real-world data.
• Enthusiasm for ambiguous problems and learning new tools and techniques.

Internship Details and Compensation

• Paid internship lasting 12–14 weeks, beginning in January 2027.
• Flexible start dates are available for qualified candidates; extensions may be offered based on project needs and mutual agreement.
• San Francisco pay rate: $75 USD per hour. Actual hourly pay depends on permissible factors including transferable skills, experience, market demands, and primary work location. Pay information is subject to change.

Work Arrangement

Hybrid employees attend the office three days weekly: Tuesday, Thursday, and a chosen Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. Hybrid in-office roles may work remotely for up to four weeks per year.

Benefits and Work Environment

Faire describes competitive pay, equity, comprehensive benefits, access to enterprise AI tools, meaningful project ownership, and supportive colleagues.

Application Information

• Faire uses AI to screen and select applicants for this position.
• This posting is for an existing vacancy.
• Recruitment accommodations can be requested using the Accommodation Request Form.
• Information about applicant data collection and choices is available in Faire's Privacy Notice.