Summer 2027 AI Search & Visual Infra Intern

TikTok; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 62,000 - 83,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Housing allowance

Job summary

TikTok in San Jose is seeking a Software Engineer Intern for the TikTok AI Search & Visual Search Infra Team for the 2027 Summer. You will design, build, and optimize large-scale infrastructure powering billions of search requests and multimodal experiences.

The role offers hands-on experience, industry exposure, and development workshops alongside senior engineers. The internship provides opportunities to learn, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and contribute to cutting-edge AI/ML

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

C++

Java

Python

Go

Linux

Data structures

Algorithms

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Master's degree preferred

Job description

TikTok in San Jose is seeking a Software Engineer Intern for the TikTok AI Search & Visual Search Infra Team for the 2027 Summer. You will design, build, and optimize large-scale infrastructure powering billions of search requests and multimodal experiences.

The role offers hands-on experience, industry exposure, and development workshops alongside senior engineers. The internship provides opportunities to learn, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and contribute to cutting-edge AI/ML