AI commerce research internship

Study the algorithms that decide what people buy online.

More and more of online shopping runs on algorithms. Search engines rank products, recommendation systems choose what you see next, and AI agents now answer a question like “which sneakers should I buy?” with a handful of products and shops. How these systems choose, and why one product wins over another, is still mostly a black box. We want to open it. SKUU reads 40,000 webshops and holds 21.5 million product variants, so we can test what these algorithms do against real product data.

The role

As a research intern you study how commerce AI finds, ranks and recommends products. That includes search and recommendation algorithms as well as the AI agents that shop on someone’s behalf. You work together with the founder, and you own your research questions from the first test to the final answer. What you find shapes the index we build for AI agents.

What you’ll work on

For example, together with the founder you will:

• Map how different AI systems rank and recommend products, including search engines, recommendation systems and shopping agents
• Send hundreds of shopping queries to these systems and track which products and shops come back
• Compare those results with our own data on price and stock, for example to see whether an algorithm recommends products that are sold out
• Find out which signals push a product up, such as price, availability, feeds, schemas and product descriptions
• Turn your findings into clear advice on how we build our index

What you’ll learn

• How ranking, retrieval and recommendation algorithms work in practice
• How AI agents and large language models search for and compare products
• How to design an experiment that gives a clear answer
• How a small team that moves fast ships real products

Who we’re looking for

• You study AI, data science, computer science or a related field, and you want to know how these algorithms work underneath.
• You set up a test properly, and a result you can’t repeat doesn’t convince you.
• You can write enough code to run many queries and analyse the results.
• You write clearly, because your findings have to convince other people.

Algorithms are starting to decide where people shop, and very few people understand how. If you want to be one of them, we’d love to hear from you.