Search Machine Learning Engineer Intern
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FULL DESCRIPTION
Search Machine Learning Engineer Intern
Company: [Employer hidden — view at passion-project.co.uk]
Location: London
Work Type: Hybrid (3 days a week in office)
Job Type: Internship (12 - 24 weeks, full-time)
Salary Range: £20,000 - £80,000 per year
About the Role
Perplexity is looking for a Search Machine Learning Engineer Intern to help build the next generation of advanced search technologies, with a focus on retrieval and ranking.
You will work closely with experienced engineers to improve search quality, experiment with new models, and ship features that directly impact how users search and discover information.
Who you are
- Strong foundation in machine learning and statistics, with coursework or projects related to information retrieval, ranking, or recommender systems
- Experience with Python and common ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) through academic, open source, or personal projects
- Familiarity with evaluating model quality using offline metrics and/or A/B testing is a plus, but not required
- Previous experience (internships, research, or significant projects) working on search, recommendation, or NLP is a plus, but not required
- Self-driven and curious, with a strong sense of ownership, willingness to learn, and comfort working in a fast-paced environment
- Experience with Rust will be a plus
What the job involves
- Contribute to experiments that improve search quality through better models, data usage, and evaluation tools, under the guidance of senior engineers
- Design and implement components of the search platform and model stack, including retrieval, ranking, and classification models
- Train evaluating models (including LLM-based approaches) for retrieval, ranking, and classification tasks
- Support deployment and monitoring of search and ranking models in a scalable and performant way
- Help build and iterate on RAG pipelines for grounding and answer generation
- Collaborate with Data, AI, Infrastructure and Product teams to deliver improvements quickly and learn best practices in production ML
About [Employer hidden]
[Employer hidden] delivers an intelligent search engine powered by conversational AI, to improve search outcomes and "unlock the power of knowledge" for all. Reaching impressive heights of 22M monthly visits, Perplexity's "ask anything" method of search is clearly a popular one. And what sets it apart from other search engines is in its answers, which are concise and fully cited, responding to the user query rather than simply providing a place in which they can scroll to find it themselves.