ML Engineer Intern - E-Commerce Growth & Personalization

TikTok; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Paid holidays

Housing allowance

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer Intern (PhD) to advance e-commerce user growth in our San Jose office. You will help optimize growth and marketing algorithms, including user value modeling, personalized messaging, and recommendations to boost engagement and GMV.

This internship is aimed at PhD students who want frontier ML methods into production, collaborating with a diverse team. Start in 2027, with hands-on projects, mentorship, and opportunities to publish results and influence

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or a related field.
• Strong ML fundamentals; clean, efficient, reproducible code and solid data structures.
• Experience in at least one of LLMs/foundation models, NLP, CV, RL, or recommendation/search/ads.
• Interest in deploying frontier ML methods to production and clear problem decomposition.

Responsibilities

• Optimize e-commerce growth and marketing algorithms (value modeling, personalization, recommendations).
• Establish a user lifecycle data/value system for TikTok Mall growth.
• Contribute to product/technical solutions for growth engines (notifications, recommendations) to raise DAU and penetration.
• Improve recall/sort for new user recommendations to boost relevance and diversity.
• Enhance marketing efficiency using uplift models and operations research for GMV growth.

Skills

ML fundamentals

Programming

Deep learning

LLMs / foundation models

NLP

CV

RL

Recommendation / search / ads

Education

PhD pursuit in CS/EE/Math/Stats

Tools

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer Intern (PhD) to advance e-commerce user growth in our San Jose office. You will help optimize growth and marketing algorithms, including user value modeling, personalized messaging, and recommendations to boost engagement and GMV.

This internship is aimed at PhD students who want frontier ML methods into production, collaborating with a diverse team. Start in 2027, with hands-on projects, mentorship, and opportunities to publish results and influence