Research Scientist Intern, Youth Safety (PhD)

Meta was built to help people connect and share, and over the last decade our tools have played a critical part in changing how people around the world communicate with one another. With over a billion people using the service and more than fifty offices around the globe, a career at Meta offers countless ways to make an impact in a fast growing organization.Meta is seeking Research Interns to join our Youth and Controls team within Facebook. Youth safety is one of the most consequential problems at Meta right now — the models you build change what millions of teenagers see every day. Our team owns age-appropriate content experiences across Facebook, including content-understanding and age-understanding models that decide what gets shown and to whom, spanning Teen Accounts, parental supervision, U13 experiences (Messenger Kids), and our most protective content tiers.More concretely, you will work on high-ambiguity, high-impact problems at the intersection of ML, integrity, and personalization: proactive detection of harmful content for youth, age-appropriate ranking and retrieval, safety-aware personalization and controls, and age-signal modeling (stated vs. predicted age reconciliation). A cross-cutting theme is evaluation at scale — building LLM-judge and quality-eval infrastructure so enforcement LLMs ship with rigorous, youth-specialized measurement, and connecting model improvements to real teen experience through human judgments and online experiments.Our internships are twelve (12) to sixteen (16), or twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year. Research Scientist Intern, Youth Safety (PhD) Responsibilities: * Meta was built to help people connect and share, and over the last decade our tools have played a critical part in changing how people around the world communicate with one another. * With over a billion people using the service and more than fifty offices around the globe, a career at Meta offers countless ways to make an impact in a fast growing organization. * Meta is seeking Research Interns to join our Youth and Controls team within Facebook. * Youth safety is one of the most consequential problems at Meta right now — the models you build change what millions of teenagers see every day. * Our team owns age-appropriate content experiences across Facebook, including content-understanding and age-understanding models that decide what gets shown and to whom, spanning Teen Accounts, parental supervision, U13 experiences (Messenger Kids), and our most protective content tiers. * More concretely, you will work on high-ambiguity, high-impact problems at the intersection of ML, integrity, and personalization: proactive detection of harmful content for youth, age-appropriate ranking and retrieval, safety-aware personalization and controls, and age-signal modeling (stated vs. * predicted age reconciliation). * A cross-cutting theme is evaluation at scale — building LLM-judge and quality-eval infrastructure so enforcement LLMs ship with rigorous, youth-specialized measurement, and connecting model improvements to real teen experience through human judgments and online experiments. * Our internships are twelve (12) to sixteen (16), or twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year. Minimum Qualifications: * Perform research to advance the science and technology of intelligent machines, applied to youth safety and integrity * Develop novel content-understanding, age-understanding, retrieval, ranking, and personalization models for age-appropriate experiences * Advance proactive enforcement approaches, including reducing reliance on human review while maintaining quality and safety * Develop training and evaluation methods using human judgments, LLM judges, and online experiments to improve safety, quality, and downstream experience * Analyze and improve efficiency, scalability, latency, and stability of safety models in production serving * Collaborate with researchers and cross-functional partners including communicating research plans, progress, and results * Publish research results and contribute to research that can be applied to Meta product development Preferred Qualifications: * Proven track record of solid research achievements as demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, as well as publications at leading AI conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, CVPR, SIGIR, WWW, or similar * Prior research or project experience in one or more of the following areas: trust and safety, integrity / abuse detection, content understanding, age modeling and verification, age-appropriate recommendation, personalization, LLM-based evaluation / LLM judges, reinforcement learning, pre-training and fine-tuning of large language models, or multimodal understanding * Demonstrated software development experience via tech internships, work experience, coding competitions, or widely used contributions in open source machine-learning repositories * Experience working and communicating cross functionally in a fast-paced team environment, with the ability to frame real-world safety problems as rigorous ML problems and drive iterations from clear analysis * Confirm interest in youth safety / integrity as a research domain, and comfort owning a problem end-to-end from hypothesis to shipped model About Meta: Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today—beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics. Meta is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Meta participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. Please note that Meta may leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in connection with applications for employment. Meta is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at [email protected]. $7,650/month to $12,667/month + benefits Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate, monthly rate, or annual salary only, and do not include bonus, equity or sales incentives, if applicable. In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits. Learn more about benefits at Meta.