📍
Menlo Park, CA

Research Scientist Intern, Modern Recommendation Systems (PhD)

Internship
Technology & Digital
Software engineering
Posted:
December 29, 2025

Meta

Social network and technology platform
71.8
Palpable Score
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Meta was built to help people connect and share, and over the last decade our tools have played a critical part in changing how people around the world communicate with one another. With over a billion people using the service and more than fifty offices around the globe, a career at Meta offers countless ways to make an impact in a fast growing organization.Meta is seeking Research Interns to join our “Modern Recommendation Systems” (MRS) AI Innovation Center. This org brings together a world-class R&D team of researchers, developers, and engineers. The MRS org is developing a unified infrastructure and model service to improve recommendations across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the “Family of Apps” (FoA). Our interns will have the opportunity to perform research on and even build AI models that will eventually run at the scale of Meta's social network.Our vision is to understand multi-modal content, especially videos, as well user interests/preference. We contribute to the mission of connecting users to the content they enjoy, are inspired by, and that they want to see more of. We conduct cutting-edge research using the complete suite of audio, visual, text and metadata signals associated with posts and videos to improve recommendation relevance across all surfaces and provide a better, more meaningful experience to users. We build tools, create frameworks and train models that we deploy together with product and infrastructure teams to gain adoption across the FoA. We also publish scientific papers to help advance the state of the art in content understanding.Our team at Meta AI offers twelve (12) to twenty-four (24) weeks long internships and we have various start dates throughout the year.

Research Scientist Intern, Modern Recommendation Systems (PhD) Responsibilities

Initiate and lead efforts towards long-term ambitious research goals, while identifying intermediate milestones in the area of recommendation systems and models, user and content understanding and multi-modal (video, audio, and text) LLM analysis for classification and relevance use cases

Conduct original research that can eventually be applied to Meta product development, engage with the wider research community, including publishing and releasing open source software where appropriate

Design, train and support video understanding libraries and models to implement new features and functionality for use internally at Meta

Collaborate with researchers and cross-functional partners including communicating research plans, progress, and results.

Minimum Qualifications

Currently has or is in the process of obtaining a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, or relevant technical field

Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment

Experience with Python, with experience in machine learning libraries such as Pytorch

Familiarity with AI/ML modeling techniques (e.g., LLM, RAG, LSTM, GRU, Transformers) and/or its acceleration for large scale use cases

Experience building systems based on machine learning and/or deep learning methods

Preferred Qualifications

Intent to return to the degree program after the completion of the internship/co-op

Proven track record of achieving significant results as demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, as well as publications at leading workshops or conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, ICML, SIGIR, WSDM, RecSys, CIKM, CVPR, ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, ICASSP, or similar

Experience working and communicating cross functionally in a team environment

Prior research or project experience in sequence modeling, recommendation systems, or user modeling

Demonstrated software engineer experience via an internship, work experience, coding competitions, or widely used contributions in open source repositories (e.g. GitHub)

For those who live in or expect to work from California if hired for this position, please click here for additional information.

About the company

Meta

Company overview
Meta builds consumer apps and platforms used by billions of people, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads. Meta makes most revenue from advertising across these products, and the company also runs Reality Labs for AR and VR hardware and software. Meta also invests heavily in AI research and product development across the company’s apps and infrastructure.

Locations and presence

Meta is headquartered in Menlo Park, California and hires across major hubs in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Work setup is generally hybrid for many corporate roles, with multi-day office expectations, and Instagram announced a five-day in-office requirement for desk-assigned U.S. staff starting February 2, 2026.

Palpable Score

71.8
/ 100
Meta offers multiple credible early-career doors, including internships, “University Grad” roles, and rotational programs that are explicitly positioned as immersive learning experiences. Pay signals look competitive and often transparent via published ranges and widely reported intern and new-grad compensation, but early-career predictability is reduced by mixed candidate experiences and widely reported workforce churn in parts of the business.
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