PhD ML Engineer Intern - Search & Relevance (12 weeks)

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 34,000 - 55,000; Full time

Job summary

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

Qualifications

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Coding skills

Algorithms & DS

NLP

Ranking

Search engine

Recommender systems

Distributed systems

Machine learning

Communication

Teamwork

Education

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

Job description

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