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

TikTok; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 62,000 - 83,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Housing allowance

Paid holidays

Job summary

TikTok is seeking interns to join the AI & Visual Search Infrastructure team, working on large-scale systems powering billions of search requests and multimodal data processing.

You will contribute to multi-agent orchestration, RAG, and LLM/VLM inference/training, with exposure to cutting-edge AI search technologies and distributed systems.

Qualifications

• 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.

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.

Skills

Programming fundamentals

Analytical thinking

Linux environment

Languages: C++, Java, Python, or Go

Communication & teamwork

Education

Bachelor's in CS or related

Master's in CS (preferred)

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.

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

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $45- $60.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Interns have day one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits and more. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year). Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing allowance.

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates

• 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; and
• Exercising sound judgment.

About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short‑form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy – a mission we work towards every day.

We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

TikTok Accommodation

TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request