Machine Learning Engineer Intern (Global E-Commerce, Recommendation) - 2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok; Singapore; On-site; SGD 20,000 - 31,000; Part time

Job summary

TikTok is seeking PhD interns to join its E-commerce recommendations team, focusing on large-scale learning algorithms such as billion-level data pipelines, live-stream and short-video recommendations. The role emphasizes hands-on research, collaboration with ML engineers and data scientists, and real-world product impact.

The internship offers opportunities to contribute to innovative AI/ML solutions, work with industry experts, and participate in a dynamic program blending hands-on learning

Qualifications

• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• Experience in applied machine learning and familiar with common algorithms.

Responsibilities

• Participate in building large-scale E-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems (billion-level).
• Build long and short term user interest models from large data to explore latent interests.
• Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking (CTRs, CRs) including real-time data pipelines and feature engineering.

Skills

Python

C++

TensorFlow/PyTorch

Problem solving

ML algorithms

Education

PhD student in CS/Software Engineering

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

Responsibilities

About the Team

E-commerce is a new and fast growing business that aims at connecting all customers to excellent sellers and quality products, through E-commerce live-streaming, E-commerce short videos, and commodity recommendation. We are a group of applied machine learning engineers and data scientists that focus on E-commerce recommendations. We are developing innovative algorithms and techniques to improve user engagement and satisfaction, converting creative ideas into business-impacting solutions. We are interested and excited in applying large scale machine learning to solve various real-world problems in E-commerce.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship. PhD internships at Our Company provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, as well as to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

Our dynamic internship experience blends hands‑on learning, enriching community‑building and professional development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

Responsibilities

• Participate in building large-scale (billion level) E-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems, including commodity recommendations, live stream recommendations, short video recommendations etc.
• Build long and short term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of various data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently.
• Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking(eg. Click Through Rate and Conversion Rate prediction) , including, but not limited to building real-time data pipelines, feature engineering, model optimization and innovation.
• Design and build supporting/debugging tools as needed.
• Support the production of scalable and optimised AI/machine learning (ML) models.
• Focus on building algorithms for the extraction, transformation and loading of large volumes of realtime, unstructured data to deploy AI/ML solutions from theoretical data science models.
• Run experiments to test the performance of deployed models, and identify and resolve bugs that arise in the process.
• Work in a team setting and apply knowledge in statistics, scripting and programming languages required by the firm.
• Work with the relevant software platforms in which the models are deployed.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently Pursuing a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• Experience in applied machine learning, familiar with one or more of the algorithms such as Collaborative Filtering, Matrix Factorization, Factorization Machines, Word2vec, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting Trees, Deep Neural Networks, Wide and Deep etc.
• Experience in Deep Learning Tools such as tensorflow/pytorch.
• Experience with at least one programming language like C++/Python or equivalent.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.
• Publications at KDD, NeurIPS, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, RecSys and related conferences/journals, or experience in data mining/machine learning competitions such as Kaggle/KDD-cup etc.

Job Information

About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short‑form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.