J-1 Visa Machine Learning Intern Jobs
Machine Learning Intern roles in the United States are available to current students and recent graduates through the J-1 visa Intern program category, which requires sponsorship from a U.S. Department of State-designated organization. Your host employer trains you while a designated sponsor like IIE or Cultural Vistas issues your DS-2019 and monitors your training plan.
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Get Access To All JobsAbout Pinterest:
Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product.
Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible.
At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.
Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.
ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
As a machine learning intern in our Advance Technology Group at Pinterest, you will be exposed to a full spectrum of ML product development. The team focuses on developing cutting-edge technologies for Pinterest’s visual understanding modules and recommender systems. You’ll conduct research that can be applied across Pinterest engineering teams and engage in external collaborations and mentoring, while also having opportunities to deploy features to hundreds of millions of users or conduct research applicable for paper submissions. We offer a 12-week fall internship program remotely or in our San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, or New York offices.
Note to applicants:
By applying to this role, you will be considered for multiple intern roles open across our various ML teams. Please only apply once within the USA or Canada as multiple applications may delay our recruitment process.
Internships are 12 weeks paid from September 21 - December 11, 2026. Depending on the team, our fall internships will be located either remote or hybrid in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York or Seattle offices.
What you’ll do:
- Develop and launch new user features using unique internal datasets and ML techniques, especially in recommendation systems, computer vision, representation learning, generative AI, and responsible AI.
- Gain hands-on experience with production ML systems, including algorithmic research, infrastructure, data engineering, training, inference, and product, to deliver innovative solutions. You will be exposed to full-stack production ML systems.
- Leverage frontier AI tools and agents to accelerate engineering implementation, including prototyping and experimentation work.
- Validate AI-generated outputs through testing, code review, and critical thinking, ensuring solutions are accurate, maintainable, secure, and aligned with team standards.
- Use AI to better understand unfamiliar code, investigate bugs, and summarize technical context or documentation.
- Contribute in cutting-edge research in machine learning and artificial intelligence that can be applied to Pinterest problems.
- Write clean, efficient, and sustainable code.
- Take proactive ownership over the completion and quality of your tasks and project with minimal guidance from your mentor, manager, and peers.
What we’re looking for:
- This role will be on our Visual Search or Applied Science teams. We are looking for candidates with experience in Computer Vision, Visual Search, User Understanding, Recommendation Systems, Reinforcement Learning, ML efficiency optimization, Generative AI, and LLMs.
- Ability to legally work full time (40 hours/week) from September-December 2026.
- Working towards a PhD degree in Computer Science, ML, NLP, Statistics, Information Sciences or related field.
- Mastery of at least one systems language (Java, C++, Python) and one ML framework (Tensorflow, Pytorch, MLFlow).
- Proficiency with AI-native engineering, including the design of agent-friendly codebases.
- High degree of autonomy in learning new agent-first development tools.
- Strong critical thinking when working with AI-generated suggestions, with a clear approach to validating correctness, performance, security, and maintainability.
- Comfort iterating on prompts, refining workflows, and adapting AI-assisted approaches based on the problem, context, and constraints.
- Experience in research and in solving analytical problems.
- Strong communicator and team player. Being able to find solutions for open-ended problems.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Publications in machine learning, AI, data science, data analytics, statistics, or related technical fields.
- Strong passion for research and for answering hard questions with research.
- Passion for applied ML and the Pinterest product.
Why Intern at Pinterest?
- Meaningful Work: Contribute to projects that impact millions of users worldwide.
- Mentorship: Learn from and be guided by experienced engineers and researchers in the field.
- Growth and Development: Participate in professional development workshops and networking events to build your skills and connections.
In-Office Requirement Statement:
- We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we’re not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
- This role may require you to be located near an office for in-person collaboration, and therefore may need to be located a commutable distance from one of our Pinterest offices.
At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.
Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.
US based applicants only
The salary for this position is $12,100 monthly.
LI-HYBRID
LI-EB1
Our Commitment to Inclusion:
Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.
About Pinterest:
Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product.
Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible.
At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.
Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.
ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
As a machine learning intern in our Advance Technology Group at Pinterest, you will be exposed to a full spectrum of ML product development. The team focuses on developing cutting-edge technologies for Pinterest’s visual understanding modules and recommender systems. You’ll conduct research that can be applied across Pinterest engineering teams and engage in external collaborations and mentoring, while also having opportunities to deploy features to hundreds of millions of users or conduct research applicable for paper submissions. We offer a 12-week fall internship program remotely or in our San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, or New York offices.
Note to applicants:
By applying to this role, you will be considered for multiple intern roles open across our various ML teams. Please only apply once within the USA or Canada as multiple applications may delay our recruitment process.
Internships are 12 weeks paid from September 21 - December 11, 2026. Depending on the team, our fall internships will be located either remote or hybrid in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York or Seattle offices.
What you’ll do:
- Develop and launch new user features using unique internal datasets and ML techniques, especially in recommendation systems, computer vision, representation learning, generative AI, and responsible AI.
- Gain hands-on experience with production ML systems, including algorithmic research, infrastructure, data engineering, training, inference, and product, to deliver innovative solutions. You will be exposed to full-stack production ML systems.
- Leverage frontier AI tools and agents to accelerate engineering implementation, including prototyping and experimentation work.
- Validate AI-generated outputs through testing, code review, and critical thinking, ensuring solutions are accurate, maintainable, secure, and aligned with team standards.
- Use AI to better understand unfamiliar code, investigate bugs, and summarize technical context or documentation.
- Contribute in cutting-edge research in machine learning and artificial intelligence that can be applied to Pinterest problems.
- Write clean, efficient, and sustainable code.
- Take proactive ownership over the completion and quality of your tasks and project with minimal guidance from your mentor, manager, and peers.
What we’re looking for:
- This role will be on our Visual Search or Applied Science teams. We are looking for candidates with experience in Computer Vision, Visual Search, User Understanding, Recommendation Systems, Reinforcement Learning, ML efficiency optimization, Generative AI, and LLMs.
- Ability to legally work full time (40 hours/week) from September-December 2026.
- Working towards a PhD degree in Computer Science, ML, NLP, Statistics, Information Sciences or related field.
- Mastery of at least one systems language (Java, C++, Python) and one ML framework (Tensorflow, Pytorch, MLFlow).
- Proficiency with AI-native engineering, including the design of agent-friendly codebases.
- High degree of autonomy in learning new agent-first development tools.
- Strong critical thinking when working with AI-generated suggestions, with a clear approach to validating correctness, performance, security, and maintainability.
- Comfort iterating on prompts, refining workflows, and adapting AI-assisted approaches based on the problem, context, and constraints.
- Experience in research and in solving analytical problems.
- Strong communicator and team player. Being able to find solutions for open-ended problems.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Publications in machine learning, AI, data science, data analytics, statistics, or related technical fields.
- Strong passion for research and for answering hard questions with research.
- Passion for applied ML and the Pinterest product.
Why Intern at Pinterest?
- Meaningful Work: Contribute to projects that impact millions of users worldwide.
- Mentorship: Learn from and be guided by experienced engineers and researchers in the field.
- Growth and Development: Participate in professional development workshops and networking events to build your skills and connections.
In-Office Requirement Statement:
- We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we’re not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
- This role may require you to be located near an office for in-person collaboration, and therefore may need to be located a commutable distance from one of our Pinterest offices.
At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise.
Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.
US based applicants only
The salary for this position is $12,100 monthly.
LI-HYBRID
LI-EB1
Our Commitment to Inclusion:
Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.
See all 63+ J-1 Visa Machine Learning Intern Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new J-1 Visa Machine Learning Intern Jobs.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding J-1 Visa Sponsorship as a Machine Learning Intern
Align your training plan with ML coursework
Your DS-2019 requires a detailed training plan tied to your current degree program. Document how each machine learning task, such as model training or data pipeline work, directly extends classroom skills your institution can verify.
Confirm your J-1 category before applying
Current students enrolled at a degree-granting institution qualify under the Intern category. If you graduated more than 12 months ago, you fall under Trainee, which carries different eligibility rules and a distinct training plan structure.
Search Migrate Mate to find ML host employers
Use Migrate Mate to filter for U.S. employers that have hosted J-1 exchange visitors in research and engineering roles. Targeting companies with prior J-1 hosting experience shortens the internal approval timeline significantly.
Ask prospective hosts about designated sponsor relationships
Some employers already partner with a designated sponsor like CIEE or Cultural Vistas and know the DS-2019 process. Others need you to arrive with your own sponsor lined up, so clarify this before accepting any offer.
Verify the 2-year home residency requirement early
Certain J-1 participants, particularly those funded by their home government or in skills on the Exchange Visitor Skills List, must return home for two years after their program. Confirm your status with your designated sponsor before signing any offer.
Time your program end date against your academic calendar
The J-1 Intern program runs for up to 12 months and must end within the authorized period on your DS-2019. Coordinate your internship offer letter dates with your university's semester schedule to avoid a gap in your enrollment status.
Machine Learning Intern J-1 Visa: Frequently Asked Questions
Which J-1 program category covers machine learning internships?
Current students enrolled in a degree program at an accredited institution qualify under the J-1 Intern category, which permits up to 12 months of practical training directly related to their field of study. If you have already graduated, the Trainee category applies instead, and your training plan must demonstrate at least one year of relevant prior experience or education in machine learning or a closely related discipline.
Who actually sponsors my J-1 visa for a machine learning internship?
The visa sponsor is a U.S. Department of State-designated organization, not your host employer. Organizations like IIE, Cultural Vistas, and CIEE issue your DS-2019, approve your training plan, and monitor compliance throughout the program. Your host company, meaning the employer running the ML internship, is the program site where your training takes place, but it carries no direct responsibility for visa administration.
How do I find host employers that will accept J-1 machine learning interns?
Use Migrate Mate to identify U.S. employers in AI, data science, and software engineering that have prior experience hosting J-1 exchange visitors. Many tech companies and research labs are familiar with the DS-2019 process but do not advertise J-1 compatibility openly in job postings. Filtering for companies with that hosting history narrows your search considerably and reduces the risk of a late-stage rejection once HR reviews your visa category.
Does a J-1 machine learning intern need a separate work authorization document like an EAD?
No. J-1 Intern status itself authorizes you to work at the specific host employer and location listed on your DS-2019. You do not apply for an EAD through USCIS. Your authorization is tied directly to the training plan your designated sponsor approved, which means any change in employer, job duties, or program dates requires your sponsor to issue an amended or new DS-2019 before you start the revised assignment.
Can a machine learning internship under J-1 lead to a full-time work visa later?
Completing a J-1 internship does not itself create a path to another visa status, and participants subject to the 2-year home residency requirement cannot change to H-1B visa or most immigrant visa categories without first fulfilling or obtaining a waiver of that obligation. However, if the home residency requirement does not apply to you, your host employer can petition for an H-1B or other work visa after your program ends, treating the internship as relevant U.S. experience.