Machine Learning Engineer Intern (E-Commerce Supply Chain & Logistics-LLM / Agent) - 2027 Start[...]

TikTok; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Housing allowance

10 paid holidays per year

Paid sick time

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a PhD internship in Seattle to join the E-commerce Global Supply Chain and Logistics team. You will apply LLMs, agents, reinforcement learning, and retrieval systems to real-world, global supply chain problems and help build AI-native capabilities for logistics at scale.

You will contribute to model training, evaluation, and deployment while collaborating with experts and leveraging cutting-edge research.

Qualifications

• PhD candidate pursuing AI or related disciplines.
• Experience with LLMs, agents, RAG, tool use, evaluation, or applied NLP.

Responsibilities

• Support development of large language models and agent systems for global e-commerce logistics.
• Build domain LLM capabilities for supply chain including pre-training, SFT, PPO, GRPO, reward modeling and inference optimization.
• Support multimodal and structured understanding for logistics scenarios and scenario simulation.
• Support core agent capability development for workflows, including AutoResearch, Harness-based task decomposition, RAG, knowledge retrieval, and tool use.
• Assist in agent architecture, evaluation, and evolution including runtime orchestration and continuous improvement.

Skills

LLMs

Agents

RAG

Python

Java

C++

Go

TypeScript

NLP frameworks

Education

PhD candidate

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

HuggingFace

LangChain

LlamaIndex

vLLM

Job description

Responsibilities

Join the E-commerce Global Supply Chain and Logistics team at TikTok. We are building AI-native capabilities for global logistics, including logistics agents, address intelligence, context engineering, agent evaluation, and workflow automation for complex supply chain operations. This role is for candidates who want to apply LLMs, agents, reinforcement learning, retrieval systems, and software engineering to real logistics problems at global scale.

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.

• Responsible for supporting the development of large language models, agent systems, and related intelligent systems for the supply chain and logistics of the global E-commerce business.
• Participate in building domain LLM model capabilities for e-commerce supply chain and logistics, including continued pre-training / CPT, SFT, preference optimization, reinforcement learning such as GRPO / PPO, reward or judge model design, model compression, inference cost and latency optimization, and landing scenarios such as address correction, trajectory prediction, logistics cost analysis, customer service semantic understanding, and root‑cause analysis.
• Support multimodal and structured understanding capabilities for logistics and supply chain scenarios, focusing on unified modeling of text, numerical time series, events, product attributes, images, and documents to support scenario simulation, explainable prediction, and integration with existing forecasting or decision systems.
• Support core agent capability development for team and business workflows, including AutoResearch, Harness-based task decomposition and execution loops, RAG and knowledge retrieval, context understanding, skill / tool use, evidence grounding, and Clone & Adapt workflows for reusing proven solutions across markets and logistics scenarios.
• Support agent architecture, engineering, evaluation, and evolution work, including runtime orchestration, memory and state management, model / tool routing, permission-safe execution, observability, benchmark and Golden Set evaluation, badcase attribution, regression testing, online feedback loops, and continuous improvement of context, skills, workflows, and model behavior.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD degree in artificial intelligence, computer science, operations research, automation, statistics, mathematics, or a related discipline
• Experience with LLMs, agents, RAG, tool use, post-training, evaluation, or applied NLP systems.
• Strong programming ability in Python and familiarity with at least one production-oriented language such as Java, C++, Go, or TypeScript.
• Familiarity with machine learning and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, vLLM, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar ecosystems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Research or project experience in coding agents, long-horizon agents, computer-use agents, agent harnesses, workflow orchestration, or automated evaluation systems.
• Experience with LLM post-training, including SFT, DPO, PPO, GRPO, RLHF, RLAIF, reward modeling, counterfactual data, or evidence-driven decision training.
• Experience building benchmarks or evaluation datasets from real user questions, including taxonomy design, golden answers, error attribution, and regression testing.
• Experience with e-commerce, logistics, operations research, data platforms, knowledge graphs, or enterprise knowledge management systems.
• Published papers, strong open-source contributions, or hands‑on projects in LLMs, agents, NLP, data mining, machine learning systems, evaluation, or AI engineering.

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60- $60.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Interns have day one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits and more. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year). Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing allowance.

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

• Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
• Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
• Exercising sound judgment.

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.

TikTok Accommodation

TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request