High-Performance Infra Engineer Intern

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 51,000 - 73,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok is offering an internship with the Recommendation System Infrastructure team, focused on building and evolving large-scale online serving and data infrastructure for recommendation systems. Interns will gain hands-on experience in high-performance C++ environments, working with GPU/CPU compute, data pipelines, and automation workflows.

Candidates pursue a Bachelor's (preferred for entry) or Master’s degree in CS, with strong systems programming skills in C++, Go, or Java, and an interest

Qualifications

• Pursuing Bachelor's degree in CS or related field.
• Strong systems programming skills in C++, Go, or Java.
• Experience building scalable backend or distributed systems.
• Solid understanding of data structures, OS, networking, and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Experience with performance analysis and large-scale service optimization.
• Strong ownership, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize high-performance online serving systems for large-scale global recommendation systems, improving business ROI, system efficiency, and serving quality.
• Improve the efficiency, reliability, scalability, and cross-regional consistency of recommendation system infrastructure.
• Identify and resolve system performance bottlenecks across CPU, memory, bandwidth, GPU, latency, throughput, and resource allocation.
• Drive cost optimization for large-scale recommendation serving, including compute resource utilization and performance improvements.
• Build reliable and efficient workflows and pipelines for automation on candidate generation, profile generation, feature processing, training data generation, and online development.

Skills

C++

Go

Java

Distributed systems

Performance analysis

Ownership & communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree in Computer Science (Preferred)

Tools

Flink

Spark

Kafka

Cpp tooling

Job description

TikTok is offering an internship with the Recommendation System Infrastructure team, focused on building and evolving large-scale online serving and data infrastructure for recommendation systems. Interns will gain hands-on experience in high-performance C++ environments, working with GPU/CPU compute, data pipelines, and automation workflows.

Candidates pursue a Bachelor's (preferred for entry) or Master’s degree in CS, with strong systems programming skills in C++, Go, or Java, and an interest