Intern ML Engineer - Generative Recommender Systems(Seattle)

TikTok; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 85,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

10 paid holidays per year

Housing allowance

Job summary

TikTok is seeking an intern for its Global E-Commerce team in Seattle. You will work on building and rewriting a billion-scale industrial recommender system, spanning retrieval, ranking, and blending across short-video, livestream, and product contexts.

The role emphasizes scaling large models, generative retrieval, and knowledge integration while exploring frontier AI methods. Interns gain hands-on experience and opportunities for growth within a leading tech company.

Qualifications

• Solid ML and engineering fundamentals: math behind models and clean, efficient, reproducible code.
• Experience or coursework in LLMs/foundation models, NLP, CV, RL, or recommendation/search/ads.
• Enthusiasm for frontier AI methods in production contexts.
• Ability to define problems and decompose them into solvable parts.

Responsibilities

• Help build an industrial recommendation system for a billion-scale user base across multiple TikTok product scenarios.
• Scale models and optimize for latency, exploring large parameter regimes and advanced training techniques.
• Develop one-stage generative retrieval and long-horizon knowledge integration.
• Work on world knowledge injection and agent-based R&D workflows.
• Participate in open-ended research with potential for patents or publications.

Skills

ML fundamentals

LLMs/NLP/RL

Problem solving

Strong coding

Education

Undergraduate in Software Development, Computer Science, or Computer Engineering

Tools

CUDA / Triton kernels

Job description

TikTok is seeking an intern for its Global E-Commerce team in Seattle. You will work on building and rewriting a billion-scale industrial recommender system, spanning retrieval, ranking, and blending across short-video, livestream, and product contexts.

The role emphasizes scaling large models, generative retrieval, and knowledge integration while exploring frontier AI methods. Interns gain hands-on experience and opportunities for growth within a leading tech company.