Machine Learning Engineer Intern (Commerce Ads) - 2027 Summer

About the role

The TikTok Commerce Ads team blends advertiser focus with technical expertise to enhance commerce ads—both open-loop and closed-loop—establishing TikTok as an essential growth engine for businesses and a top destination for consumers to discover and buy products, content, and services. This internship offers hands-on experience, industry exposure, and opportunities to apply knowledge to real-world challenges while building a foundation for personal and professional growth. Interns will gain practical experience, explore career paths, and participate in social events, learning programs, and development workshops alongside industry professionals.

Responsibilities

• Build highly scalable machine learning systems and state-of-the-art models to improve ads ranking quality and optimize advertisers' marketing strategies, including click-through rate prediction, conversion rate prediction, intelligent format selection, and user journey optimization.
• Explore, develop, and experiment with new features to improve model accuracy.
• Understand ads platform objectives and leverage modern machine learning to enhance ads relevance, quality, and quantity delivered to end-users.
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Designers, and other disciplines to explore the next generation of shopping experiences on TikTok.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's or above degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Solid programming skills in Go, C/C++, Python, or similar languages.
• Familiarity with basic data structures and algorithms.
• Experience with Linux development environments.
• Good analytical thinking capability and essential knowledge of statistics.
• Strong theoretical grounding in machine and deep learning concepts and techniques (e.g., CNN/RNN/LSTM).
• Familiarity with the architecture and implementation of at least one mainstream machine learning framework (TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet).
• Must be able to commit to a 12-week full-time work period during Summer 2027.

Preferred Qualifications

• Good understanding of ads bidding & auction, ads quality control, or online advertising systems (e.g., CPC/CPM, CTR/CVR, Ranking/Targeting, Conversion/Budget, Campaign/Creative, Demand/Inventory, DSP/RTB).
• Experience in resource management and task scheduling with large-scale distributed software (e.g., Spark, TensorFlow).
• Relevant work or research experience in search and recommendation.

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.

Pay

The hourly rate for this position is $45.