Impactful Search ML Engineer Intern

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Housing allowance

Paid holidays

Paid sick time

Job summary

TikTok is seeking talented PhD students for a 12-week internship with the Search team in San Jose. You will help build search features, study user behavior, and contribute to large-scale data-driven projects.

Collaborate with engineers, product, data science, and ML teams; write clear code and documentation; participate in mentorship and professional development events. This internship offers hands-on learning and housing support where available.

Qualifications

• Must commit to a 12-week full-time internship.
• PhD in Software Development, CS, CE, or related field.
• Strong coding and algorithm/data structure fundamentals.
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills.
• Experience in NLP, ranking, ads, search engine, recommender systems, distributed systems, and ML.

Responsibilities

• Support the design, implementation, testing, and iteration of Search features, services, or tools under the guidance of engineers and mentors.
• Work with large-scale data, logs, metrics, or experiments to understand user search behavior and improve product or system quality.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, data science, and machine learning partners to define requirements and deliver project milestones.
• Write clear, maintainable code and documentation for assigned workstreams.
• Communicate progress, risks, and learnings with mentors and stakeholders throughout the internship.

Skills

Coding skills

Algorithms & Data Structures

Communication

Teamwork

NLP

ML

Education

PhD in Software Development/CS/CE or related

Job description

TikTok is seeking talented PhD students for a 12-week internship with the Search team in San Jose. You will help build search features, study user behavior, and contribute to large-scale data-driven projects.

Collaborate with engineers, product, data science, and ML teams; write clear code and documentation; participate in mentorship and professional development events. This internship offers hands-on learning and housing support where available.