Research Scientist Intern, Feed Recommendations (PhD)

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 Feed Recommendation team within Facebook. This org is directly in charge of recommending all sorts of contents to users the time they open the app, and thus always gets the first-hand experience of critical pain points to solve. Our interns will have the opportunity to participate in the process of framing practical, high-impact challenges in recommendation into rigorous machine learning problems, and bring their own expertise to build innovative solutions under the guidance from our research scientists and software engineers.

More concretely, while the generative AI innovations in NLP are mainly focusing on optimizing the probabilities of selecting the next word token, in recommendation the vocabulary (contents to suggest) is at a much larger scale and also changing at a fast speed. The preference for these contents can also vary dramatically across users and time. If you’re excited about how to generate the correct sequences of “words” any time the giant number of Facebook users open or scroll down the blue app, come to join us!

Our internships are twelve (12) to sixteen (16), or twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year.Research Scientist Intern, Feed Recommendations (PhD) Responsibilities

• Initiate and lead efforts towards ambitious research goals, while identifying intermediate milestones to reach and gathering insights step by step.
• Conduct innovative research on deep-learning algorithms and models that can eventually be deployed into Meta’s recommendation products, meeting industry-level requirements on efficiency, scalability, and stability.
• Collaborate with team members and cross-function partners, including communicating research plans, progress and results. Document findings and share learnings internally. We are also open to publishing research achievements externally, but it is not a requirement for this role.

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently has or is in the process of obtaining a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment.
• Familiarity with both probabilistic modeling and common deep learning architectures (LSTMs, attention mechanisms, Transformers, VAEs, etc.)
• Experience with Python, especially machine learning libraries such as Pytorch and TensorFlow.

Preferred Qualifications

• Intent to return to the degree program after the completion of the internship/co-op.
• Proven track record of solid research achievements as demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, as well as publications at leading AI conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP and KDD.
• Prior research or project experience in one or more of the following areas: sequence-to-sequence modeling, reinforcement learning, deep generative models, large language models, conditional generative flow networks, recommendation systems and natural language processing.
• Demonstrated software development experience via tech internships, work experience, coding competitions, or widely used contributions in open source machine-learning repositories.
• Experience working and communicating cross functionally in a fast-paced team environment. Ideal candidates should have the ability to quickly understand and identify the research opportunities behind real-world applications, select the appropriate ML methods to explore, and proactively drive the iterations based on clear analysis of the current results.

For those who live in or expect to work from California if hired for this position, please click here for additional information. LocationsAbout 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 committed to providing reasonable support (called accommodations) in our recruiting processes for candidates with disabilities, long term conditions, mental health conditions or sincerely held religious beliefs, or who are neurodivergent or require pregnancy-related support. If you need support, please reach out to accommodations-ext@fb.com. $7,500/month to $11,333/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.