Machine Learning Engineer Intern (TikTok Search) - 2026 Start (PhD)

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); Vor Ort; USD 34.000 - 55.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

TikTok Inc. in San Jose invites PhD students to join our 2026 internship program for 12 weeks as full-time interns on TikTok's Search Engineering Team.

You will contribute to building and owning the search engine, leveraging NLP, CV, LLM, and machine learning to improve relevance and user experience. This internship blends hands-on learning with collaboration across research and engineering, including project work on content understanding, user behavior modeling, and video understanding to

Qualifikationen

• Pursuing a PhD in a related technical discipline.
• Strong coding skills and solid data structures knowledge.
• Experience with NLP, ML or related areas is valued.

Aufgaben

• Contribute to TikTok's search engine using NLP, CV and ML techniques.
• Collaborate with research and engineering teams to improve relevance and ranking.
• Support projects on content understanding, user behavior modeling and video understanding.

Kenntnisse

Coding skills

Algorithms & DS

NLP

Ranking

Search engine

Recommender systems

Distributed systems

Machine learning

Communication

Teamwork

Ausbildung

PhD in Computer Science/Software Eng/Computer Engineering or related field

Jobbeschreibung

Responsibilities

Team Introduction

Our Search Engineering Team is responsible for building and owning TikTok's search engine which can provide our users with the best search experience. In TikTok Search Team, you'll have the opportunity to build full-stack search engine system and combine information retrieval technology with modern machine learning methods from related fields such as NLP, CV, and recommender system. We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2026. PhD Internships at TikTok aim to provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

PhD internships at TikTok provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands‑on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

This internship provides students the opportunity to join one of our engineering teams where you will have the opportunity to:

• Content understanding: Applying the industry's cutting‑edge NLP and CV technology and leveraging LLM to match the most relevant videos for each search query, and continuously improve the relevance of TikTok search.
• User Behavior Modeling: solving the recommendation problem in search, let TikTok search increase the ability of personalization on the basis of "relevant", and understand users better.
• Video understanding: comprehensive use of NLP, CV, as well as LLM for better video understanding from the perspective of the video itself and social network, improve authority, credibility, and usefulness of search results.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Must be able to commit to a 12-week full-time work.
• Currently pursuing a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Proficient coding skills and strong algorithm & data structure basis.
• Effective communication and teamwork skills.
• Experience in one or more of the following areas: NLP, Ranking, Ads, search engine, recommender system, distributed system, and machine learning.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated software engineering experience from previous internship, work experience, coding competitions, or publications.
• High levels of creativity and quick problem-solving capabilities.

Privacy Statement

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