Machine Learning Engineer Intern (Recommendations and Search) - 2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 65,000 - 92,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Paid holidays

Housing allowance

Wellbeing benefits

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture invites PhD candidates to join a 12-week internship in Seattle, focusing on building and scaling high-impact ML solutions for personalized experiences while upholding strict data privacy and security standards.

You will design, train, and evaluate ML models, develop end-to-end pipelines, and analyze large-scale user data to enable real-time and offline features in a highly secure environment.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in a technical field such as CS, CE, or SE.
• Able to commit to a 12-week internship in Summer 2027.
• Proficient coding skills and solid data structures knowledge.
• Effective communication and teamwork abilities.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and evaluate ML models for recommender systems or search ranking.
• Build efficient pipelines for feature extraction, model training, and A/B testing.
• Analyze massive user data and logs to create real-time and offline features.

Skills

PhD student

Strong coding

Communication

Teamwork

Education

PhD in Computer Science / Computer Engineering

Tools

scikit-learn

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

Responsibilities

About the team

The Tech and Product team of TikTok USDS is missioned to empower TikTok US users to have a great user experience with strong data security and privacy protections, focusing on compliance, reliability, business and product support, and efficiency improvement.

As part of this team, you will build and scale high-impact Machine Learning solutions—including recommendation engines, search relevance, and e-commerce systems—designed specifically to deliver personalized, high-performing experiences while ensuring world-class data governance, privacy compliance, and system security for US users.

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.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, train, and evaluate machine learning models for recommendation systems or search ranking.
• Implement efficient pipelines for feature extraction, model training, evaluation, offline-to-online deployment, and A/B testing.
• Process and analyze massive user behavior data and catalog logs using distributed systems to construct real‑time and offline features.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Able to commit to a 12-week internship during Summer 2027.
• Proficient coding skills and strong algorithm & data structure basis.
• Effective communication and teamwork skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.
• Familiar with machine learning frameworks such as scikit‑learn, tensorflow, pytorch.
• Ability to think critically, rationally, and communicate in result-oriented, data-driven manner.

About USDS

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision‑making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.

On‑site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real‑time decision‑making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in‑person schedule up to 5 days a week.

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.

USDS Reasonable Accommodation

USDS 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/USDS-RA

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (hourly)

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $57- $57.

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.