PhD ML Engineer Intern: Recs & Search

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Housing allowance

Paid holidays

Paid sick time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a PhD candidate for a 12-week Machine Learning Engineer Intern position starting Summer 2027 in Seattle. You will design, train, and evaluate ML models for recommendations and search, build scalable pipelines, and work with large-scale user data and logs.

This role emphasizes real-time features, offline training, privacy, and security considerations. Join a mission-driven team focusing on high-impact ML solutions with strong governance, collaborating

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.
• 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.

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.

Skills

Proficient coding

Strong algorithms & data structures

Effective communication & teamwork

Experience in ML systems

Education

PhD candidate in CS/CE or related field

Tools

scikit-learn

tensorflow

pytorch

Job description

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a PhD candidate for a 12-week Machine Learning Engineer Intern position starting Summer 2027 in Seattle. You will design, train, and evaluate ML models for recommendations and search, build scalable pipelines, and work with large-scale user data and logs.

This role emphasizes real-time features, offline training, privacy, and security considerations. Join a mission-driven team focusing on high-impact ML solutions with strong governance, collaborating