Data Science - Applied LLM, Co-op

About Ancestry:
When you join Ancestry, you join a human-centered company where every person’s story is important. Ancestry®, the global leader in family history, empowers journeys of personal discovery to enrich lives. With our unparalleled collection of more than 40 billion records, over 3 million subscribers and over 23 million people in our growing DNA network, customers can discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. Over the past 40 years, we’ve built trusted relationships with millions of people who have chosen us as the platform for discovering, preserving and sharing the most important information about themselves and their families.

We are committed to our location flexible work approach, allowing you to choose to work in the nearest office, from your home, or a hybrid of both (subject to location restrictions and roles that are required to be in the office- see the full list of eligible US locations HERE). We will continue to hire and promote beyond the boundaries of our office locations, to enable broadened possibilities for employee diversity.

Together, we work every day to foster a work environment that's inclusive as well as diverse, and where our people can be themselves. Every idea and perspective is valued so that our products and services reflect the global and diverse clients we serve. 

Ancestry encourages applications from minorities, women, the disabled, protected veterans and all other qualified applicants. Passionate about dedicating your work to enriching people’s lives? Join the curious.

Ancestry seeks an exceptional, passionate, highly motivated Data Science Co-Op to join our Discovery Data Science team this summer. The Discovery Data Science team works primarily with the algorithms behind Ancestry's content recommendation and information retrieval. We empower customers’ family history research with various possible solutions, like record linkage, recommendation engines, personalization, search, and AI agents. As a Data Science Co-Op on the Discovery Data Science team, you will conduct research to improve LLMs' reasoning capabilities and reliability, driving innovation and scalability for our AI agents. These ground-breaking methods are crucial to extending Ancestry’s influence in the era of AI-powered innovation.

What You Will Do:

• Use data and different ML solutions to create meaningful family history products for customers

• Work with other data scientists and software engineers to develop and deploy ML models at scale

• Advocate for data-driven decision-making and support sustainable value creation by cultivating exceptional data science capabilities in machine learning, generative AI, and agentic workflows

• Contribute to technical discussions, help translate business questions into data science problems, and find cost-effective solutions to the challenges at hand

Who You Are: 

• Pursuing an advanced degree (MS/PhD) in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics or other related field

• Demonstrated experience in applied research, including the implementation of published models and methodologies to solve real-world problems

• Proficient in Python and SQL, familiar with AI/ML/LLM-related libraries such as Hugging Face and LangChain

• Hands-on experience with applied machine learning algorithms and data visualization techniques

• Experience with deep neural networks, with familiarity in either PyTorch or TensorFlow/Keras

• Nice to have: Prior experience in large language model (LLM) development or application, such as fine-tuning, alignment tuning, reasoning enhancement, prompting strategies, agentic frameworks, etc.

Additional Information:

Ancestry is an Equal Opportunity Employer that makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, military or veteran status, citizenship, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. In addition, Ancestry will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

All job offers are contingent on a background check screen that complies with applicable law.  For San Francisco office candidates, pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Ancestry will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.  

Ancestry is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at Ancestry via-email, the Internet or in any form and/or method without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of Ancestry. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Ancestry as a result of the referral or through other means.