[2026] Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation Systems - Intern

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators.

At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there.

A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.

Roblox is ushering in the next generation of entertainment, allowing people to create and play together in immersive, user-generated worlds. We're the one and only fastest-growing entertainment platform that lets anyone teach themselves how to code and publish any experience imaginable — across any device — reaching players across the globe every day!

Roblox's platform is experiencing unprecedented growth, and as a PhD Intern, you will be at the forefront of this exciting journey! You'll be part of a world-class team that is revolutionizing the entertainment industry and empowering millions of players worldwide. During this 12 or 16-week internship, we'll support you as you tackle the hardest problems in tech today – content understanding, ML based recommendation, distributed systems, real-time communication, 3D co-experience, extensive data processing, rendering, physics. Roblox offers the opportunity to conduct experiments at scale with millions of users globally, vast datasets, and cutting-edge client-server technologies. We're looking for experts to focus on the following areas:

• Search and Discovery: powers major recommendation surfaces—conducting cutting-edge research in generative modeling, multimodal and MLLM technologies, designing advanced agentic AI algorithms to solve business requirements while achieving technical breakthroughs.

• Ads & Brands: focuses on ranking, retrieval, and marketplace/auction theory to optimize sponsored content delivery.

You Will

• Engage with Roblox as part of your PhD thesis during the internship and beyond on a case-by-case basis

• Perform hands-on ML Engineering, develop prototypes, and conduct experiments to solve challenging problems.

• Transition and apply innovative ML breakthroughs into large scale production systems

You Have

• Pursuing or recently completed a PhD in computer science, engineering, or a related field, with a thesis aligned to Roblox areas.

• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Go, Node.js, Ruby, Python, C++, Lua, Swift, C#, or Java

• Published and presented peer-reviewed articles in top-tier venues.

• Proficiency in coding, with experience building and optimizing large-scale systems.

You may redact age, date of birth, and dates of attendance/graduation from your resume if you prefer.

For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual hourly rate could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. Please note that not all benefits shown on this page are applicable to internship opportunities.

Hourly Pay Range
$72—$72 USD

Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).

Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.