Internship - Search Machine Learning Engineer
$12k - $24k • Belgrade • FullTime
Posted 8mo ago
About the job
Perplexity is seeking a Search Machine Learning Engineer Intern to contribute to the development of next-generation search technologies, with a specific emphasis on retrieval and ranking. Interns will collaborate with seasoned engineers to enhance search quality, explore novel models, and implement features that directly influence user search and information discovery experiences. This internship program offers a duration of 12-24 weeks, operating on a full-time or part-time basis, and requires in-person attendance at our Belgrade office.
Responsibilities
- Contribute to experiments aimed at improving search quality through enhanced models, data utilization, and evaluation tools, under senior engineer guidance.
- Design and implement components of the search platform and model stack, including retrieval, ranking, and classification models.
- Train evaluation models, including LLM-based approaches, for retrieval, ranking, and classification tasks.
- Support the deployment and monitoring of search and ranking models in a scalable and performant manner.
- 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
- Strong foundation in machine learning and statistics, with relevant coursework or projects in information retrieval, ranking, or recommender systems.
- Experience with Python and common ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) demonstrated through academic, open-source, or personal projects.
- Familiarity with evaluating model quality using offline metrics and/or A/B testing is a plus.
- Previous experience (internships, research, or significant projects) in search, recommendation, or NLP is a plus.
- Self-driven, curious, with a strong sense of ownership and willingness to learn in a fast-paced environment.
- Experience with Rust is a plus.
- Currently enrolled in a Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD program at a Serbian university, or self-taught with a strong passion for software engineering and technology.
- Comfortable working in English within a collaborative, professional environment.
- Ability to thrive in a high-performance environment with high standards and direct feedback.
- Willingness to challenge and be challenged, ask questions, share perspectives, and provide constructive pushback.