Research Scientist Intern, Ranking & Recommendations (PhD)

Meta; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 85,000 - 141,000; Full time

Job summary

Meta seeks Research Interns to join the Post-Training & Research team within Facebook Discovery, focusing on ranking, recommendations, and AI model post-training. Internships run 12 to 24 weeks with multiple start dates.

You will design and train DL models on Facebook-scale data, evaluate with offline metrics and online experiments, and publish results to advance product development. Collaboration with researchers and cross-functional partners is encouraged.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in CS, AI, ML or related technical field.
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization.
• Experience with Python and PyTorch.
• Familiarity with modern AI/ML modeling techniques (e.g., Transformers, LLMs, multimodal models, diffusion models, RAG).
• Experience building systems based on machine learning and/or deep learning methods.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead a research project in ML for ranking and recommendation with milestones.
• Design, train and post-train deep learning models on Facebook-scale data.
• Evaluate models with offline metrics and online experiments, analyze results for next steps.
• Publish research results and contribute to Meta product development.
• Collaborate with researchers and cross-functional partners, communicating plans, progress, and results.

Skills

Python

Deep learning

Transformers

LLMs

Multimodal models

AI agents

PyTorch

C++

Education

PhD in Computer Science / AI / ML or related field

Tools

PyTorch

C++

Job description

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 Post-Training & Research team within Facebook. The team is part of Facebook Discovery, which builds the systems that decide which posts, photos, videos and Reels people see on Facebook. Our team works on ranking and recommendation, content understanding, and post-training of the AI models behind agentic experiences on Facebook. Our interns will have the opportunity to turn open problems in these systems into research questions and work on them with our research scientists and engineers, with the potential for impact on billions of people.We believe large language models (LLMs) and AI agents will change how recommendation systems are built. We study generative recommendation models that are trained like language models on sequences of user activity. We build ranking models that reason over a person’s history and a set of candidates to rank and compose what that person sees. We use multimodal models to understand the quality and originality of posts and videos. We post-train models with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from user feedback, both for recommendation and for AI agents on Facebook. We deploy our models together with product and infrastructure teams, and we publish our results to advance the state of the art.Our internships are twelve (12) to twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year.

Research Scientist Intern, Ranking & Recommendations (PhD) Responsibilities:

• Define and lead a research project in machine learning for ranking and recommendation, with clear milestones over the course of the internship.
• Design, train and post-train deep learning models, from recommendation models to LLMs and AI agents, on Facebook-scale data.
• Evaluate models with offline metrics and online experiments, and analyze the results to decide the next iteration.
• Publish research results and contribute to research that can be applied to Meta product development.
• 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, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, 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 and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch
• Familiarity with modern AI/ML modeling techniques (e.g., Transformers, deep learning for recommendation, LLMs and LLM reasoning, multimodal models, mixture-of-experts, diffusion models, RAG, AI agents, post-training with SFT and RL)
• 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
• 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, ICML, KDD, SIGIR, WSDM, RecSys, CIKM, ACL, EMNLP, CoLM, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, or similar venues
• Research experience in one or more of the following areas: LLM reasoning, post-training (SFT, reinforcement learning, reward modeling), AI agents, generative recommendation, diffusion models, ranking and recommendation systems, sequence and user modeling, computer vision, or multimodal content understanding
• Experience training large-scale deep learning models, such as LLMs or recommendation models
• Experience with C++ or with optimizing LLM training and inference
• Demonstrated software engineering experience via an internship, work experience, coding competitions, or widely used contributions in open source repositories (e.g. GitHub)
• Proficiency in using AI coding agents for rapid development and independent problem solving
• Experience working and communicating cross functionally in a team environment

About Meta:

Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today—beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics.

Meta is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Aff…? We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Meta participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. Please note that Meta may leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in connection with applications for employment.

Meta is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at [e-mail].

$7,650/month to $12,667/month + benefits

Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate, monthly rate, or annual salary only, and do not include bonus, equity or sales incentives, if applicable. In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits. Learn more about benefits at Meta.