Internship - Search Machine Learning Engineer
$12k - $24k • London • FullTime
Posted 5mo ago
About the job
Perplexity is seeking a Search Machine Learning Engineer Intern to contribute to the development of next-generation search technologies, specifically focusing on retrieval and ranking. This internship offers a hands-on opportunity to collaborate with experienced engineers, enhance search quality, experiment with novel models, and implement features that directly influence user search and information discovery experiences. The program is designed for a 12-24 week full-time engagement, conducted in person at our London office.
Responsibilities
- Contribute to experiments aimed at improving search quality via enhanced models, data utilization, and evaluation tools, under senior engineer guidance.
- Design and implement components for the search platform and model stack, covering retrieval, ranking, and classification.
- Train evaluation models, including LLM-based methods, for retrieval, ranking, and classification tasks.
- Support the deployment and monitoring of search and ranking models for scalability and performance.
- Assist in building and iterating on RAG pipelines for grounding and answer generation.
- Collaborate with Data, AI, Infrastructure, and Product teams to expedite improvements and learn production ML best practices.
Requirements
- Solid foundation in machine learning and statistics, demonstrated through coursework or projects in information retrieval, ranking, or recommender systems.
- Proficiency in Python and common ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) via academic, open-source, or personal projects.
- Familiarity with evaluating model quality using offline metrics and/or A/B testing is advantageous.
- Prior experience (internships, research, or significant projects) in search, recommendation, or NLP is beneficial.
- Self-motivated and curious, with a strong sense of ownership, eagerness to learn, and adaptability to a fast-paced environment.
- Experience with Rust is a plus.