Software Engineer Intern (TikTok AI Search & Visual Search Infra Team) - 2027 Summer

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

Job summary

TikTok Inc. is seeking interns for its AI & Visual Search Infrastructure team. You will help design and optimize large-scale infrastructure powering AI-powered and visual search across billions of requests.

Join a team that tackles multi-agent orchestration, RAG indexing, LLM/VLM inference, and high-performance training and serving platforms. You will collaborate with engineers and researchers in a fast-paced, exploratory environment.

Qualifications

• Pursuing or holding a CS-related degree; strong programming fundamentals.
• Familiarity with Linux and proficiency in at least one programming language (C++, Java, Python, Go).
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities; good communication.
• Ownership mindset and willingness to learn.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize large-scale infrastructure for TikTok AI Search & Visual Search.
• Evolve multi-agent platforms, RAG indexing, tool-calling workflows, and memory management.
• Deploy and optimize LLM/VLM post-training and inference including GPU acceleration.
• Develop scalable data pipelines and distributed systems for huge text/image/video data.
• Work with ML, product, and engineering teams to deliver AI-powered search experiences.
• Collaborate in a culture of self-direction and problem-solving.

Skills

Programming fundamentals

C++/Java/Python/Go

Problem solving

Communication & teamwork

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Master's degree in Computer Science (preferred)

Tools

Linux

vLLM / TensorRT-LLM

LangGraph (agent framework)

CUDA / GPU acceleration

Job description

Responsibilities

About the team
The TikTok AI&Visual Search Infrastructure team builds systems that power intelligent search experiences for users around the world. Our infrastructure serves billions of search requests every day and supports products including traditional search, AI-powered search results, in-app chatbots, and visual search.
Our work spans both foundational search engine infrastructure and the rapidly evolving AI Search technology stack. We build large-scale indexing and retrieval systems, multimodal search infrastructure, multi-agent and RAG engines, and high-performance LLM/VLM training and serving platforms.
As an engineer on the team, you will have the opportunity to work on challenging problems across AI Agents, RAG, LLM/VLM inference/training, distributed systems, search engines and multimodal machine learning. You will collaborate closely with engineers, researchers, and product teams to help shape the next generation of TikTok Search.
We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship.

• Our internship program offers students hands-on experience, industry exposure, and opportunities to apply their knowledge to real-world challenges while building a strong foundation for personal and professional growth.
• Interns will gain practical experience, explore potential career paths, and participate in social events, learning programs, and development workshops alongside industry professionals.

Candidates may apply to a maximum of two positions across Our Company and its affiliates globally. Applications will be considered in the order they are submitted.
Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Please clearly state your availability in your resume, including your start and end dates.
Candidates who pass resume screening will be invited to participate in Our Company's technical online assessment.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize large-scale infrastructure for TikTok AI Search & Visual Search, supporting billions of online search requests and large-volume offline data processing.
• Evolve TikTok's search agent platform, including multi-agent orchestration, ReAct and tool-calling workflows, RAG indexing & serving engine, and context/memory management.
• Deploy and optimize LLM/VLM post-training and inference, including GPU inference acceleration, SFT/RL efficiency, kernel/CUDA optimizations, and offline throughput improvement.
• Build and improve search engine components such as offline document processing pipelines, distributed indexing systems for billion/trillion documents, feature extraction services, and multi-stage retrieval/ranking services
• Develop scalable data pipelines and distributed systems for processing billion- or trillion-scale text, image, and video datasets, covering offline computation, stream processing, task scheduling, storage, and data quality.
• Explore emerging technologies in personalized search, generative search, multimodal understanding, reinforcement learning, model alignment, and evaluation.
• Collaborate with machine learning, product, and other engineering teams to deliver accurate, responsive, and engaging AI-powered and visual search experiences.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualification(s):

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
• Strong programming skills and a solid foundation in data structures and basic algorithms.
• Familiarity with Linux development environment and proficiency in at least one programming language such as C++, Java, Python, or Go
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, with an interest in solving complex engineering problems at scale.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills, along with a strong sense of ownership and willingness to learn.

Preferred Qualification(s):

• Currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
• Internship, research, course project, or open-source experience in one or more of the following areas:
• LLM/VLM serving, RAG, or AI agents
• Distributed systems, storage systems, and large-scale data processing
• Search engines, information retrieval, recommendation systems, or advertising systems
• Understanding of search engine concepts such as query understanding, indexing, retrieval, ranking, and result aggregation
• Familiarity with LLM serving frameworks such as vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM, or agent development frameworks such as LangGraph, is a plus.
• Experience analyzing or optimizing system performance, including latency, throughput, concurrency, memory utilization, or resource efficiency
• Ability to learn new technologies quickly and apply them to practical engineering or research problems