Machine Learning Engineer Intern (Recommendations and Search) - 2027 Start (PhD)

About the team

The Tech and Product team of TikTok USDS is missioned to empower TikTok US users to have a great user experience with strong data security and privacy protections, focusing on compliance, reliability, business and product support, and efficiency improvement.

As part of this team, you will build and scale high-impact Machine Learning solutions—including recommendation engines, search relevance, and e-commerce systems—designed specifically to deliver personalized, high-performing experiences while ensuring world-class data governance, privacy compliance, and system security for US users.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship. PhD internships at Our Company provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, as well as to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and professional development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Please clearly state your availability in your resume (Start date, End date).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, train, and evaluate machine learning models for recommendation systems or search ranking.
• Implement efficient pipelines for feature extraction, model training, evaluation, offline-to-online deployment, and A/B testing.
• Process and analyze massive user behavior data and catalog logs using distributed systems to construct real-time and offline features.

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Able to commit to a 12-week internship during Summer 2027.
• Proficient coding skills and strong algorithm & data structure basis.
• Effective communication and teamwork skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.
• Familiar with machine learning frameworks such as scikit-learn, tensorflow, pytorch.
• Ability to think critically, rationally, and communicate in result-oriented, data-driven manner.