About the Position

Machine Learning Intern

London, England, United Kingdom

About Us

At the core of Epic’s success are talented, passionate people. Epic prides itself on creating a collaborative, welcoming, and creative environment. Whether it’s building award-winning games or crafting engine technology that enables others to make visually stunning interactive experiences, we’re always innovating.

Being Epic means being a part of a team that continually strives to do right by our community and users. We’re constantly innovating to raise the bar of engine and game development.

About the Role

Epic Games is looking for current PhD students and recent PhD graduates (within 12 months of graduation) for paid research internships, working on state-of-the-art machine learning across our ecosystem. Epic makes Unreal Engine, which powers creative work across many industries, alongside some of the world's most popular games, including Fortnite and Rocket League. Through these products, ML research at Epic reaches millions of creators and players every day. AI is reshaping the games industry, and Epic Research - led by Lucia Specia and Michael Black - is at the center of that shift. We're looking for talented interns who want to be part of it.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will work with our team of research scientists and engineers at the intersection of vision, language, speech processing, embodied agents, and game development to create state-of-the-art machine learning models in a range of areas. Research topics of interest include:

AI-backed interactive characters: LLMs for conversational characters, memory systems, automated evals, animation, etc.
Game agents: vision-language-action, game-state agents, etc.
3D human and object tracking
Reinforcement learning for embodied behavior
Speech systems and conversational agents
World building and game logic generation: video models, 2D->3D scene building, etc.
AI-assisted game development, e.g. the next generation of Epic Developer Assistant for UE and UEFN
Embodied and physical intelligence including human-object interaction
Multi-modal diffusion models
Player safety: AI-alignment, content moderation, etc.
Improved user experience: personalised game recommendation, game representation, spam detection, etc.
Content localization: (multimodal) translation, quality assurance, etc.
Model distillation for realtime performance

Requirements

An ongoing or recently completed (within the last 12 months) PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, AI or a related field
A record of publication in top conferences/journals
Experience implementing deep learning algorithms for problems in computer vision, natural language processing, or speech/audio processing
Hands-on knowledge of state-of-the-art ML methods, such as Transformers, diffusion models, and reinforcement learning
Experience with post-training foundation models, including SFT, preference training, and reinforcement learning
Excellent AI coding and experimental engineering skills
Desirable: game development experience in either C++ or C#

Internship Details

Duration: 5-12 months initially (depending on your location), with flexible start-dates throughout 2026/2027
Hours: full-time (40 hours/week) or part-time (20 hours/week)
Location: Select regions within North America and Europe
Employment Authorization: You must hold an existing right to work in your given location for the full duration of the internship - visa sponsorship or support is unavailable for this role
Publishing: Research by Epic interns is regularly published in top-tier conferences

We Offer

Epic Games deeply values diverse teams and an inclusive work culture, and we are proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. Learn more about our Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Policy here.

Note to Recruitment Agencies: Epic does not accept any unsolicited resumes or approaches from any unauthorized third party (including recruitment or placement agencies) (i.e., a third party with whom we do not have a negotiated and validly executed agreement). We will not pay any fees to any unauthorized third party. Further details on these matters can be found here.

Machine Learning Intern

Job description