AI Research Intern (PhD)

About the role

Our mission at Duolingo is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. It’s a big mission, and that’s where you come in! At Duolingo, you’ll join a team that cares about educating our users, experimenting with big ideas, making fact-based decisions, and finding innovative solutions to complex problems. You’ll have limitless learning opportunities and daily collaborations with world-class minds — while doing work that’s both meaningful and fun. Join our life-changing mission to develop education for our half a billion (and growing!) learners around the world.

Responsibilities

• Apply AI methods to massive real-world datasets
• Prototype new models, evaluate with small scale experiments, and/or productionize solutions at scale
• Work with a cross-functional team of world class researchers, engineers, and others to build new product features and/or publish state-of-the-art findings
• Solve our most ambitious problems with the right tool for the task
• Collaborate cross-functionally to bring your ideas to life in the product
• Identify problems, prototype solutions, evaluate their return on investment, and then implement the best solution at scale to improve the lives of our millions of learners each day

Requirements

• Pursuing a PhD in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, or related field
• Graduation expected by August 2028
• Contributions to research communities and efforts, including publishing papers at conferences such as ACL, CVPR, EDM, ICML, NeurIPS, etc.
• A portfolio of impactful work, in the form of (for example) publications, open-source projects, or AI internships
• Experience implementing AI systems in Python, Java, Scala, or C/C++ (i.e., not just R or MATLAB)
• A creative, interdisciplinary, and entrepreneurial approach to R&D
• Strong debugging and critical thinking skills

Schedule

12 week consecutive availability: May 24, 2027 – August 13, 2027 or June 14, 2027 – September 3, 2027. Ability to relocate to Pittsburgh, PA or New York, NY required.

Benefits

• Language learning opportunities
• Catered in-house lunches, and breakfast and dinner options
• Company-wide Hackathon
• PTO and company holidays
• Frequent company-wide dinners, monthly celebrations, social clubs, and more

Pay

Hourly range for this internship is $67–$69 USD.