Research Scientist Intern– E-commerce Recommendation(LLM Applications) - Global Frontier Tech R[...]

TikTok; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 64,781 - 92,264; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Paid holidays

Paid sick time

Housing allowance for non-remote interns

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a PhD intern for 2027 in Seattle, focusing on building cutting-edge recommendation systems and contributing to innovative e-commerce solutions. The ideal candidate is pursuing a PhD in Computer Science with a strong machine learning foundation and familiarity with data frameworks like Hadoop. Compensation is $57 per hour, with various benefits, making it an excellent opportunity for aspiring tech innovators.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD, strong foundation in machine learning, publications preferred.
• Familiarity with big data frameworks like Hadoop and Spark.
• Experience with TensorFlow or PyTorch for training and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Build recommendation systems to enhance user experience and platform security.
• Deliver end-to-end machine learning solutions addressing product challenges.
• Collaborate cross-functionally on product strategies.

Skills

Machine learning foundation

AI technologies knowledge

Big data frameworks familiarity

TensorFlow or PyTorch experience

Education

Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science or related discipline

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Hadoop

MapReduce

Spark

Job description

Responsibilities

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for a PhD internship in 2027. The internship will allow students to actively contribute to our products and research, and help shape the organization’s future plans and emerging technologies.

Core responsibilities include:

• Build industry-leading recommendation systems to improve user experience, content ecosystem, and platform security.
• Explore generative recommendation techniques such as Diffusion Models, prompt learning, and multimodal content generation to unlock new capabilities in content discovery.
• Build multi-model and cross-scenario systems that enable unified recommendation across livestreams, short videos, and search.
• Deliver end-to-end machine learning solutions to address critical product challenges.
• Own the full stack machine learning system, optimizing algorithms and infrastructure to improve recommendation performance.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to design product strategies and build solutions that grow the platform in important markets.

Team Introduction

Global E‑commerce is an e‑commerce business built on TikTok Shop. The Data‑E-commerce team serves as the core algorithm and technical backbone of our business, focusing on algorithmic innovation in the e‑commerce domain. You will collaborate with product and engineering leaders to tackle both technical and business challenges, driving the deep integration of advanced technologies into real‑world e‑commerce scenarios.

Project Overview

We will build a foundational large model tailored for Global E‑commerce scenarios. The model will unify key elements such as users, products, content, logistics, and inventory into a single modeling framework. In addition, we will design an Agent framework to integrate capabilities such as task planning, tool usage, multi‑turn interaction, and environmental awareness, enabling end‑to‑end intelligent decision‑making across workflows like demand forecasting, traffic allocation, and personalized recommendation.

Key Challenges

• Unify heterogeneous data (behavior, sales time series, multimodal content) into aligned high‑dimensional representations.
• Collaborate recommendation LLMs and world models to generate personalized recommendations end‑to‑end.
• Item tokenization for recommendation: encode hundreds of millions of items and massive user behavior data for large‑scale training.
• Build multilingual, multimodal large models achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance for e‑commerce.
• Establish robust metrics and safeguards for agent evaluation, safety, and compliance.

Project Value

• Technical: Build a general‑purpose multimodal foundation model that drives scaling‑law‑generated growth and establishes a strong technical foundation.
• Business: Establish a foundational large model that powers generative recommendation, temporal models, and agent‑based systems to drive global revenue and user retention.

Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Strong foundation in machine learning, with knowledge of cutting‑edge AI technologies. Publications in top‑tier academic conferences or competition experience are preferred.
• Familiarity with big data frameworks such as Hadoop, MapReduce, and Spark.
• Experience with TensorFlow or PyTorch for model training and deployment; understanding of training acceleration techniques such as mixed precision and distributed training.

Preferred qualifications:

• Knowledge of model compression and inference acceleration techniques, including quantization, pruning, distillation, and TensorRT optimization.
• Expertise in at least one of the following areas:
• Computer Vision & Multimodality: in‑depth research experience in multimedia or computer vision fields, large‑scale multimodal model development for e‑commerce scenarios.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): in‑depth research experience in NLP, large language models, and enterprise‑level applications for e‑commerce.

Job Information

Compensation: $57 per hour (Hourly).

Benefits: Health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, 10 paid holidays, and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in the first half of the year, 40 if hired in the second half). Non‑remote interns may be eligible for a housing allowance. The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

EEO Statement – Los Angeles County (Unincorporated)

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws, including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

• Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues.
• Appropriately handling and managing confidential information, including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems.
• Exercising sound judgment.