Machine Learning Engineer Intern (Data-Search-TikTok Recommendation) - 2026 Summer (BS/MS)

Responsibilities

Team Introduction
Our Search Engineering Team builds and owns TikTok's search engine, aiming to provide users with the best search experience. In the TikTok Search Team, you'll develop a full-stack search engine system and integrate information retrieval technologies with modern machine learning methods from fields like NLP, CV, and recommender systems.

Culture and Opportunities
We foster a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving. We seek talented individuals for an internship in 2026, offering industry exposure and hands-on experience. Interns will have the chance to watch their ambitions become reality through real-world scenarios and development workshops.

Internship Details
The internship offers the opportunity to join one of our engineering teams, where you can participate in improving the search core algorithm. Possible directions include:

• Content understanding: Applying cutting-edge NLP and CV technology and leveraging LLM to match relevant videos for each search query and continuously improving search relevance.
• User Behavior Modeling: Solving the recommendation problem in search to enhance personalization based on "relevance," and gain deeper insights into user behavior.
• Video understanding: Utilizing NLP, CV, and LLM to better comprehend videos from both a content and social network perspective, enhancing authority, credibility, and usefulness of search results.

Qualifications

• Minimum Qualifications: Commit to a 12-week full-time work period during Summer 2026. Pursuing a Bachelor's or Master's in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline. Proficient coding skills and strong algorithm & data structure foundation. Effective communication and teamwork skills. Experience in NLP, Ranking, Ads, search engine, recommender system, distributed system, and machine learning.
• Preferred Qualifications: Demonstrated software engineering experience from internships, work experience, coding competitions, or publications. High levels of creativity and quick problem-solving capabilities.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency]
Compensation Description (Hourly): - Campus Intern: $45-$60 per hour. 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. They receive 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 of the year). Interns who are not working 100% remotely may also be eligible for a housing allowance. The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates: Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws, including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship on the following job duties: 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.