Machine Learning Engineer Intern (Ads Signal & Measurement) - 2027 Summer

TikTok Ads’ Signal & Measurement team owns the full stack of advertising effectiveness—from signal collection and identity resolution to attribution modeling and causal measurement. We build the systems and models that help advertisers worldwide understand and maximize the true business value of their ad spend on TikTok. Our work sits at the intersection of large-scale machine learning and causal inference, applied at massive scale to answer the hardest question in advertising: “Did this ad actually work?” The team’s scope covers four pillars: signal, attribution, identity, and measurement. These outputs directly power downstream ads ranking and delivery models, closing the loop from measurement back to optimization.

About the role

As a new grad on the team, you will be paired with an experienced mentor, own real projects from day one, and grow across both machine learning and large-scale systems. Our internship program offers hands-on experience, industry exposure, and opportunities to apply your knowledge to real-world challenges while building a strong foundation for personal and professional growth. Interns gain practical experience, explore potential career paths, and participate in social events, learning programs, and development workshops alongside industry professionals.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve machine learning models for signal quality—anomaly detection, signal recovery, denoising, and correction—to ensure the reliability of advertiser conversion data at scale.
• Contribute to cross-platform identity resolution: improve the precision and coverage of our Identity Graph through probabilistic matching models and graph algorithms.
• Participate in attribution model design and implementation, including multi-touch attribution (MTA), modeled conversions, and incrementality measurement.
• Drive the downstream application of signal, identity, and attribution data in ranking models—improve conversion prediction and bidding/ranking quality by feeding higher-fidelity signals, resolved identities, and modeled conversions into ads ranking systems, and own the data-to-model feedback loop end to end.
• Help build large-scale experimentation infrastructure and data pipelines powering Conversion Lift, Brand Lift, Split Test, and cross-media measurement products.
• Explore LLM-powered signal intelligence—apply large language models to the semantic understanding of advertiser conversion data, enabling intelligent classification, quality assessment, and automated correction of event signals.
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and Infrastructure teams to turn algorithmic ideas into production systems serving advertisers globally.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor’s or above degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Solid foundation in machine learning and statistics: comfortable with concepts such as hypothesis testing, regression, probabilistic models, and ideally causal inference.
• Strong programming skills in at least one of Python, Go, Java, or C/C++, with a solid grasp of data structures and algorithms.
• Hands-on ML experience through coursework, research, internships, or personal projects (e.g., training and evaluating models on real-world data).
• Strong communication skills and eagerness to learn in a fast-paced environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Internship, research, or project experience in one or more of: computational advertising, recommendation/search ranking, causal inference or A/B experimentation, entity resolution/graph learning, anomaly detection, or applied LLMs/NLP.
• Publications at ML/data mining venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, WWW) or strong performance in algorithm/ML competitions (e.g., ACM-ICPC, Kaggle).
• Experience with large-scale data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Flink) or ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Genuine curiosity about ads tech and how advertisers think about ROI and measurement.

Pay

The hourly rate for this internship position is $45.

Benefits

• Day-one access to health insurance, life insurance, and wellbeing benefits.
• 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in the first half of the year, 40 if hired in the second half).
• Eligibility for housing allowance if not working 100% remote.