Machine Learning Intern (PhD)

Location: San Mateo, California, United States. The role is based in San Mateo and includes collaboration with a London-based anomaly detection team. Relocation assistance is available for eligible candidates. Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the United States and must not require current or future work visa sponsorship.

Salary: $63.50 USD per hour during the internship period.

Company

hirify.global's PlayStation Global Research & Development organization researches and develops technologies for gaming.

What you will do

• Research and develop vision-language and multimodal models for game scene understanding and anomaly detection.
• Investigate self-supervised learning, contrastive learning, state-space models, representation learning, and related machine learning approaches.
• Design and conduct experiments, evaluate model performance and generalization, and explore new evaluation metrics.
• Develop prototypes for game QA, including detection of unexpected gameplay behaviors, bugs, and glitches during development, certification, and compatibility testing.
• Analyze results, identify improvements, and collaborate with researchers and engineers on technical challenges and future research directions.
• Explore developing research findings into a paper for submission to a suitable research conference while managing a project from research questions through potential real-world application.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, or a related field, ideally in the later stages of the program.
• Expected graduation between May 2026 and December 2029 from an accredited university; advanced degree must be a PhD.
• Strong research background in machine learning, computer vision, multimodal learning, or related areas, including independent exploration of open-ended research problems.
• Proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience designing experiments, evaluating machine learning models, and interpreting research results.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills, including the ability to seek, receive, and incorporate feedback from researchers and engineers.
• Publication record in relevant conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL, or EMNLP.
• Availability for the entire 12-week internship period during either May 17–August 6 or June 14–September 3.
• United States work authorization without requiring visa sponsorship from hirify.global now or in the future.

Nice to have

• Interest in gaming, game engines, or the intersection of machine learning and game technology.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on research experience with experienced researchers and engineers across PlayStation Global R&D.
• Joint supervision from the San Mateo-based GameLens focus team and collaboration with the London-based Anomaly Detection focus team.
• Relocation assistance is available for eligible candidates.
• The position follows a hybrid working policy, with individual base pay determined partly by job-related factors and location.
• Background checks are conducted at the offer stage for new employees.

Hiring process

• Successful candidates undergo background checks at the offer stage, which may include criminal background checks.