Research Scientist Intern, Scam and Trust (PhD)

Meta was created to foster connection and sharing worldwide. Over the past decade, our platforms have transformed global communication. With over a billion active users, joining Meta provides extraordinary opportunities to make a meaningful impact within a rapidly evolving organization.

Meta is seeking Research Scientist Interns to join our Scam and Trust team within Facebook. Scams are a global financial threat. At Meta’s scale, proactive detection and prevention are essential for protecting billions of users worldwide, making addressing scams one of the top priorities at Meta. The space is highly adversarial as bad actors continually change tactics and operate across content, behavior, and social networks, making isolated signals and static models insufficient. You will develop novel modeling and evaluation methods that address these challenges.

You will work alongside research scientists and engineers to translate a real-world scam-detection and prevention challenge into a focused research project. Research opportunities include combining large language model (LLM) reasoning with actor representations and content or behavioral signals, and developing agentic systems that use tools to gather evidence, investigate suspicious activity, and adapt their reasoning.

You may also investigate recursive self-improvement methods that enable LLM-based systems to identify weaknesses, propose improvements to their strategies or workflows, and validate those improvements through rigorous evaluation. Other research opportunities include learning from noisy and limited labels, transferring methods across surfaces, and maintaining robustness under distribution shift as adversaries evolve. Promising research may inform production systems that protect people from scams and contribute to research publications.

Our internships are twelve (12) to sixteen (16), or twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year.

The Facebook company is now 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.

We want to give people the power to build community and bring...