Research Scientist Intern

About the Role

Meta Reality Labs is developing technologies for immersive visual experiences across Meta's products and AR/VR platforms. Research spans AI, computer vision, multimodal language models, and maps, focusing on enabling devices like AI glasses to understand user location.

As a Research Scientist Intern, you will advance the state-of-the-art in a fast, lightweight VLM driven visual localizer that reasons over semantic and geometric evidence in images and structured map representations to estimate location, floor, and camera pose. You will collaborate with researchers and engineers, with opportunities to publish your work and influence future products.

Key Responsibilities

• Research, develop, and prototype advanced technologies in Computer Vision, Multimodal Machine Learning, and Visual Localization. This includes compact vision-language models that extract structured spatial evidence from images and localize them against structured map representations.
• Deliver research results that are publishable and have a direct impact on Reality Labs or Meta’s Family of Apps.
• Build datasets, metrics, and benchmarks for localization accuracy, latency, and cost, comparing against frontier vision-language models.
• Analyze the efficiency, accuracy, scalability, and stability of deployed technologies to identify opportunities for impact through novel research.
• Collaborate with team members throughout the project lifecycle, from research to prototyping to deploying products.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Experience in one or more areas of Computer Science, such as Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Vision-Language Models, Visual Localization.
• Proven track record of achieving significant results, demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, or co-authored publications at top-tier conferences (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML).
• Experience with modern C++ and/or Python.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or related fields.
• Intent to return to degree program after internship completion.
• Research experience in visual localization, visual place recognition, image geolocalization, scene text recognition, or camera pose estimation.
• Mathematical background in linear algebra, numerical optimization, and probabilistic estimation.
• Understanding of 3D geometry and camera models.
• Experience training or fine-tuning vision-language models, including distillation, reinforcement learning, or efficient inference (e.g., quantization or structured outputs).
• Familiarity with map and place data, floor plans, or positioning signals like GPS and Wi-Fi.
• Relevant research or software engineering work experiences (internship, work experience, coding competitions, open-source contributions).
• Strong communication skills and ability to convey research ideas to a broad audience.
• Interpersonal experience: cross-group and cross-culture collaboration.