Summer Intern, PhD AI/ML Scientist
2 weeks ago
We're on a mission to deliver riveting storytelling for all of America. At The Washington Post, you'll help reinvent news. Our work is driven by a deep investigative spirit and enhanced by innovation to bring audiences closer to the stories that matter most.
About Our Team
The Washington Post is powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us to reinvent news. Beyond our award-winning Newsroom and Opinions teams, we work across many departments, including Brand & Events, Communications, Customer Care, Engineering & Product, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing & Advertising, Print Operations, and Sales.
Why This Role Matters
The Washington Post is on a mission to reinvent how journalism is created, personalized, and delivered. Our AI/ML organization powers breakthrough experiences across Generative AI, Personalized News & Recommendations, Revenue Science & Reinforcement Learning, and Core Search & Ranking systems. As a PhD intern, you will work alongside scientists, engineers, and product partners to solve some of the most challenging problems at the intersection of machine learning, information retrieval, generative LLM systems, and digital news consumption. The following teams are available for internship:
- Generative AI (Ask The Post, Research Mode, RAG Systems): Build next-generation conversational AI products, retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, reasoning engines, hallucination-safe summarization, and evaluation frameworks that power Ask The Post, personalized podcasts, and research-assisted news exploration.
- Personalization & Recommendations: Design and train large-scale ranking systems, two-tower models, graph-based recommenders, embeddings, and experimentation pipelines that power personalized modules such as For You, home-page ranking, article recommendations, and real-time user modeling.
- Revenue Science (Metering & Paywall Optimization, Ads Relevance, RL Systems): Apply causal inference, reinforcement learning, optimization, and behavioral modeling to maximize subscription growth and advertising revenue while improving long-term reader value.
As a PhD intern, you will:
- Lead a full-cycle applied research project from problem definition to experiment to production-ready prototype.
- Conduct original research in machine learning, generative AI, NLP, recommender systems, RL, causal inference, or information retrieval.
- Work with large-scale behavioral, content, and interaction datasets to uncover insights and build intelligent systems.
- Develop novel algorithms for:
- Retrieval-augmented generation and grounding
- Multi-turn and agentic search
- Personalization and user modeling
- Reinforcement learning for metering and pricing
- Large-scale ranking and embeddings
- Design and run A/B tests, offline evaluations, and model-driven product experiments.
- Collaborate closely with engineering, design, and product partners across the organization.
- Publish internal research and, where appropriate, externalize work at top conferences.
- This is an opportunity to conduct high-impact applied research with immediate real-world influence.
Required Qualifications
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, NLP, Information Retrieval, or a related field.
- Strong research background in one or more areas: LLMs/GenAI, NLP, IR/Search, Recommender Systems, RL, Causal Inference, Optimization, Graph ML, or Representation Learning.
- Proficiency in at least one ML-oriented programming language or framework: Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow
- Experience handling large-scale datasets, distributed computing, or experimentation platforms.
- Ability to independently define research questions, design experiments, and synthesize findings.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially in explaining complex technical ideas to non-technical audiences.
- Publications in machine learning, AI, NLP, IR, recommender systems, or related areas.
- Experience building or evaluating Conversational Systems, RAG systems, Fine-Tuning LLMs, Multiarm Bandits, and Reinforcement Learning.
- Experience with cloud computing platforms (e.g., AWS), big-data technologies (e.g., Spark, Beam, BigQuery), and/or real-time serving systems.
- Strong interest in applying ML to real-world solutions that power personalization and audience engagement with journalism.
Additional Information:
Interns are paid hourly and expected to work 35-40 hours per week.
Our internship program is based out of our D.C. office, so you are expected to be on-site for the summer and follow The Washington Post's in-person work policy. We do not provide housing, but can suggest options upon request. You must be enrolled in a degree-seeking program at the time of submitting this application. We encourage you to apply if you are currently a student, regardless of your background or experience with engineering and/or journalism.
Foreign nationals can apply for internships. All work samples must be submitted in English. If selected, the required documentation to verify U.S. work authorization must be provided. The Post is unable to provide visa sponsorship for internships. If you have any questions, please reach out to life@washpost.com
We will review all applications and invite a subset of applicants to the next process, which includes live coding and interviews with team leads.
Our program provides a meaningful learning experience for engineers who support The Washington Post's mission. Our interns work directly with our full-time engineers on real production features.
Additionally, you'll be invited to exclusive events like our annual intern hackathon and lunch seminars from leaders across the company.
This internship is not a guarantee of a job at The Post. We have hired from our internship classes in the past, and we hope to continue this trend in the coming years. Note our internship program is not a binding contract-you can take a full-time job elsewhere or from your (or another) team at The Post before the internship ends.
Collaboration makes us stronger. That's why our offices are designed with open layouts, modern technology, and easy access to transportation. With certain exceptions for newsgathering and business travel, we work on-site five days a week.
Your story awaits. Apply today
Learn more about The Post at careers.washingtonpost.com.
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