ML Engineer Intern — E‑commerce AI & Recommendations

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 68,000 - 97,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Housing allowance

Paid holidays

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a PhD intern to contribute to large-scale e-commerce AI systems. You will design and implement ML-driven recommendations and merchant tools, working with cross-functional teams to bring research to production.

This internship offers hands-on learning, collaboration with industry experts, and exposure to cutting-edge AI, ML, NLP, and multimodal technologies used to enhance discovery and monetization on the TikTok Shop ecosystem.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Operations Research or a related technical discipline.
• Strong grasp of data structures, algorithms, and problem solving.
• Profound knowledge in machine learning, statistics, and big data engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design and build ML, recommendation, and ranking algorithms for large-scale real-time product suggestions.
• Develop AI-powered merchant operation systems and AI agents to optimize affiliate strategies and ROI.
• Apply LLMs, NLP, and multimodal ML to uncover new business opportunities and growth.
• Collaborate with PMs, engineers, and cross-functional teams to move AI ideas from research to production.
• Stay at the forefront of AI advances, prototyping and productionizing new tech for intelligent commerce.
• Build ML agents to automate algorithm development, accelerating experimentation and deployment.

Skills

PhD candidate in CS/related

Data structures & algorithms

Machine learning & statistics

Big data engineering

Education

PhD student in Computer Science or related field

Job description

TikTok is seeking a PhD intern to contribute to large-scale e-commerce AI systems. You will design and implement ML-driven recommendations and merchant tools, working with cross-functional teams to bring research to production.

This internship offers hands-on learning, collaboration with industry experts, and exposure to cutting-edge AI, ML, NLP, and multimodal technologies used to enhance discovery and monetization on the TikTok Shop ecosystem.