Infra Engineer Intern - Performance & Efficiency

TikTok; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 37,000 - 62,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance (day one)

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

10 paid holidays

Paid sick time

Housing allowance eligibility

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Software Engineer Intern for the Recommendation Infra, Performance Efficiency team in San Jose for Summer 2027. You will design and optimize high-performance online serving systems for large-scale recommendation workloads, focusing on efficiency, reliability, and cross-regional consistency.

You will gain hands-on experience with C++-based infrastructure, participate in performance analysis, and contribute to cost-optimization strategies while collaborating with

Qualifications

• Pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
• Strong programming skills in at least one systems programming language such as C++, C, Go, or Java.
• Experience building scalable backend or distributed systems and high-performance online services.
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, OS, networking, and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Experience with performance analysis, debugging, reliability improvements, or large-scale service optimization.
• Strong ownership, problem-solving ability, and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

C/C++

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Data structures

Operating systems

Networking

Performance analysis

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Tools

Flink

Spark

Kafka

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Software Engineer Intern for the Recommendation Infra, Performance Efficiency team in San Jose for Summer 2027. You will design and optimize high-performance online serving systems for large-scale recommendation workloads, focusing on efficiency, reliability, and cross-regional consistency.

You will gain hands-on experience with C++-based infrastructure, participate in performance analysis, and contribute to cost-optimization strategies while collaborating with