Applied AI/ML Scientist Intern - Winter 2027

About the role

Faire is a technology wholesale platform connecting independent retailers worldwide. Its Applied AI/ML Science team builds and maintains the models that power the marketplace, including shipping and delivery estimates. This paid Winter 2027 internship runs for 12 to 14 weeks starting in January 2027, with flexible start dates and possible extensions.

Key responsibilities

• Own a focused project in one of three areas: predicting how an order will be packed, recommending better packing to reduce shipping cost, or inferring product weight, size and shape from catalog images and text.
• Survey the literature and existing approaches to find promising ideas.
• Prototype and train models offline, benchmarking against current methods.
• Turn the strongest approach into a working implementation and work with Applied Scientists and ML Engineers to test it against live traffic.
• Present findings and recommendations to the team.

Required profile

• Currently enrolled in or recently graduated from a Master's or PhD program in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Electrical Engineering or a related technical field.
• Ability to read research papers and turn promising ideas into working code.
• Solid grounding in statistics and model evaluation, including benchmarking against strong baselines and estimating uncertainty.
• Comfort working with noisy or incomplete real-world data and an enthusiasm for ambiguous problems.

Required skills

• Hands-on experience building deep learning models (e.g. PyTorch), ideally with images, text or both, including fine-tuning pre-trained models or working with embeddings.
• Familiarity with gradient-boosted trees and other tabular ML methods.
• Strong Python and SQL.

What we offer

• Paid rate of $75 USD per hour in San Francisco, adjusted for factors such as experience and location.
• Hybrid arrangement: office 3 days per week, with up to 4 weeks of remote work per year allowed.
• Flexible paid time off, paid parental leave up to 16 weeks, comprehensive health coverage and fertility benefits.
• Mental health support, professional development stipends and an employer-sponsored retirement plan.