PhD ML Engineer Intern: Real-Time E‑Commerce AI

TikTok; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 68,000 - 97,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Paid holidays

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer Intern (PhD) in San Jose to design and implement large-scale e-commerce recommendation and search systems. You will work on AI-powered merchant tools, refine ranking models, and apply LLMs and multimodal ML to unlock new business opportunities and growth.

The role emphasizes collaboration with product and engineering teams to bring research into production while staying ahead of AI advances and building reusable ML agents to streamline workflows.

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• Design and build cutting-edge machine learning, recommendation, and ranking algorithms to power large-scale e-commerce systems.
• Develop AI-powered merchant operation systems and AI agents to optimize affiliate strategies and ROI.
• Apply state-of-the-art LLMs, NLP, and multimodal ML to discover new business opportunities and drive growth.
• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, and cross‑functional teams to productionize AI solutions.
• Stay at the forefront of AI advances, rapid prototyping and deployment of new technologies for intelligent commerce.
• Build ML‑agents to automate algorithm development workflows, accelerating experimentation and deployment.

Skills

Data structures

Algorithms

Machine learning

Statistics

Big data engineering

Education

PhD in Computer Science/Engineering/OR related field

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer Intern (PhD) in San Jose to design and implement large-scale e-commerce recommendation and search systems. You will work on AI-powered merchant tools, refine ranking models, and apply LLMs and multimodal ML to unlock new business opportunities and growth.

The role emphasizes collaboration with product and engineering teams to bring research into production while staying ahead of AI advances and building reusable ML agents to streamline workflows.