Machine Learning Scientist Intern

Coursera was launched in 2012 by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller with a mission to provide universal access to world-class learning. It is now one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, with 183 million registered learners as of June 30, 2025. Coursera partners with over 350 leading university and industry partners to offer a broad catalog of content and credentials, including courses, Specializations, Professional Certificates, and degrees. Coursera’s platform innovations enable instructors to deliver scalable, personalized, and verified learning experiences to their learners. Institutions worldwide rely on Coursera to upskill and reskill their employees, citizens, and students in high-demand fields such as GenAI, data science, technology, and business. Coursera is a Delaware public benefit corporation and a B Corp.

We’re a global platform aiming to transform lives through learning by offering transformative courses, certificates, and degrees that empower learners worldwide to advance their careers through skill mastery. We’re looking for inventors, innovators, and lifelong learners eager to shape the future of education. If you’re ready to build the global programs and tools that fuel the power of online learning, join Team Coursera.

At Coursera, we are committed to building a globally diverse team and are thrilled to extend employment opportunities to individuals in any country where we have a legal entity. We require candidates to possess eligible working rights and have a compatible timezone overlap with their team to facilitate seamless collaboration. 

Coursera has a commitment to enabling flexibility and workspace choices for employees. Our interviews and onboarding are entirely virtual, providing a smooth and efficient experience for our candidates. As an employee, we enable you to select your main way of working, whether it's from home, one of our offices or hubs, or a co-working space near you.

Job Overview:

The Machine Learning team at Coursera is seeking interns to contribute to the development of the next generation of hyper-personalized search and recommendation systems. As an intern, you will play an instrumental role in researching and developing state-of-the-art techniques for delivering relevant, personalized, and context-aware search and recommendations redefining the learning experience on our platform. This internship will involve assisting in the building of a robust information retrieval (IR) system and recommendations engine, as well as staying current with emerging trends and innovations in machine learning, information retrieval, and online education.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to the development, deployment, and maintenance of recommendation ranking models using machine learning techniques, including basic familiarity with two-tower models, natural language processing (NLP), and learning-to-rank.
• Work in a cross-functional team to understand business needs and contribute to the deployment of innovative solutions into production.
• Contribute to the evaluation of search and recommendation models using industry-standard metrics, analyze results, and provide insights for model improvement.
• Contribute to Coursera's research efforts by supporting projects that may lead to publications in relevant conferences.

Basic Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a B.E./B.Tech Degree or higher in Computer Science, or related technical field
• Must be currently enrolled in a full time degree program and returning to the program after the completion of the internship

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strong competencies in machine learning algorithms and techniques, including supervised and unsupervised learning.

Knowledge of popular machine learning frameworks and libraries (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn).Experience in machine learning through internships, coursework, school projects, or personal projects (e.g., Kaggle competitions).Self-motivated, innovative, and hands-on, with a relentless focus on impact and the ability to work independently.

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You may want to check out this cool course on Coursera about how to prepare for a software engineering interview - it has some great tips that would work well for an interview at Coursera as well. These are our most recent blogs by our past interns: Remote Internship Survival Guide & Empowering Teammates and Thriving Remotely