PhD ML Research Intern: Generative Recommender Systems

TikTok; Seattle, Northern (WA, KY); Hybrid; USD 79,000 - 91,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Housing allowance

Paid holidays

Wellbeing benefits

Job summary

TikTok is seeking PhD internship candidates in Seattle to contribute to next‑gen recommender research. You will explore generative and agentic architectures, LLM-driven insights, and long‑term user experience modeling within our E‑commerce recommendation team.

The internship emphasizes hands‑on learning with cutting‑edge research and collaboration with industry experts, offering a dynamic environment and opportunities for professional development.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in CS, EE, Math, Statistics or related discipline.
• Strong foundation in machine learning and deep learning with research or project experience in LLMs, RL, or recommender systems.

Responsibilities

• Generative Recommendation Research: Drive evolution of recommender systems to generative paradigms; explore generative retrieval and re-ranking; optimize training and inference on GPUs.
• LLM for Recommendation Research: Use LLMs, RL, and related techniques to enhance semantic understanding and reasoning in recommender systems for e-commerce scenarios.
• Agentic Recommendation Research: Build self-evolving agents to continuously optimize recommender systems and enable real-time personalized decisions.
• Long-Term Value and User Experience Modeling: Develop algorithms to measure and optimize long-term value (LTV) and user experience.

Skills

Machine learning

Python

Deep learning

Research experience

Education

PhD in CS/EE/Math

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

Job description

TikTok is seeking PhD internship candidates in Seattle to contribute to next‑gen recommender research. You will explore generative and agentic architectures, LLM-driven insights, and long‑term user experience modeling within our E‑commerce recommendation team.

The internship emphasizes hands‑on learning with cutting‑edge research and collaboration with industry experts, offering a dynamic environment and opportunities for professional development.