Epic Games is hiring a Machine Learning Intern in Montreal!
Epic Games is hiring paid machine-learning research interns to join Epic Research, the team behind advanced work in ML, AI, character animation and digital humans. Interns collaborate with research scientists and engineers on problems that feed directly into Fortnite, Unreal Engine, MetaHuman and the tooling creators use daily, so results can reach millions of players and developers. The group is led by Lucia Specia and Michael Black and partners with universities and product teams to move fresh research into shipping products. The placement is intended for people currently enrolled in a PhD or who finished one within the past year, and it offers unusual flexibility: terms run 5 to 12 months with start dates spread across 2026 and 2027, and interns may work either full-time (40 hours weekly) or part-time (20 hours). Work is based in select regions of North America and Europe, and applicants must already hold the right to work in their location for the whole term, since visa sponsorship is not offered. Interns are encouraged to publish, and their research regularly appears at top-tier conferences. The role suits someone who wants to push state-of-the-art models in a production-scale entertainment setting while working alongside experienced researchers on open problems.
Key responsibilities
- Partner with Epic Research scientists and programmers on machine-learning projects spanning vision, language, speech, embodied agents and game development
- Develop state-of-the-art models for topics such as LLM-driven conversational characters, memory systems, automated evaluations and animation
- Explore game agents, including vision-language-action systems and game-state reasoning
- Conduct research on 3D human and object tracking, reinforcement learning for embodied behaviour, and human-object interaction
- Build speech systems and conversational agents, plus multimodal diffusion models
- Work on world building and game-logic generation, such as video models and 2D-to-3D scene construction
- Contribute to AI-assisted development tools, including the next generation of the Epic Developer Assistant for Unreal Engine and UEFN
- Research player-safety problems such as AI alignment and content moderation, and user-experience problems like personalised game recommendation, representation and spam detection
- Apply multimodal translation and quality assurance techniques to content localisation
- Investigate model distillation for real-time performance
- Aim to publish findings at top-tier conferences and journals
Key requirements
- Currently pursuing or recently completed (within 12 months) a PhD in computer science, mathematics, AI or a closely related field
- A record of publication at top conferences or journals
- Experience implementing deep-learning algorithms for computer vision, natural language processing, or speech and audio processing
- Hands-on familiarity with modern ML methods such as Transformers, diffusion models and reinforcement learning
- Experience with post-training foundation models, including supervised fine-tuning, preference training and reinforcement learning
- Strong AI coding ability and experimental programming skills
- Existing authorization to work in the posting location for the full internship; visa sponsorship is unavailable
- Nice to have: game-development experience in C++ or C#
- Seniority: Internship (PhD students and recent PhD graduates)
- Work mode: Not specified
- Key skills: Deep learning, Transformers, Diffusion models, Reinforcement learning, Computer vision, Natural language processing, Speech and audio processing, Post-training (SFT, preference training), Experimental programming, C++, C#, Game development
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