Machine Learning Engineer Intern (E-Commerce Recommendation/Search Alliance) - 2027 Start (PhD)

About the role

The E-commerce Alliance team connects merchants and creators across the TikTok Shop ecosystem. We help merchants achieve their business goals by building intelligent and automated affiliate operation tools, while providing creators with efficient and highly personalized product recommendations that make it easier to discover the right products and create high-quality content. By improving merchant–creator matching, recommendation, search, and end-to-end collaboration efficiency, we aim to expand merchants’ marketing opportunities, increase creators’ monetization potential, and deliver a more engaging and personalized shopping experience to TikTok users.

Our team works on large-scale recommendation and search systems, intelligent affiliate operations, creator and product understanding, and machine learning solutions that impact commerce growth. This internship blends hands-on learning, community-building, professional development, and collaboration with industry experts.

Responsibilities

• Design and build cutting-edge machine learning, recommendation, and ranking algorithms to power large-scale e-commerce recommendation systems that deliver high-quality, real-time product recommendations for millions of users.
• Develop AI-powered merchant operation systems and AI agents that help merchants optimize affiliate strategies, improve business ROI, and lower the barrier to growing their business through automation.
• Apply state-of-the-art LLMs, NLP, and multimodal machine learning to discover new business opportunities, driving sustainable growth for both merchants and creators.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, engineers, and cross-functional teams to bring innovative AI solutions from research to production.
• Stay at the forefront of advances in AI and machine learning, rapidly prototyping and productionizing new technologies to shape the future of intelligent commerce.
• Build ML-agents to automate algorithm development workflows, accelerating experimentation, model iteration, evaluation, and deployment.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Operations Research or a related technical discipline.
• Strong grasp of data structures, algorithms, and top-notch problem-solving skills.
• Profound knowledge in machine learning, statistics, and big data engineering.

Preferred Qualifications

• Thorough understanding of data structures and algorithms, with excellent problem-solving ability.
• Deep understanding of machine learning, statistics, scaling distributed computing, and big data engineering.

Pay

The hourly rate for this internship position is $57.

Benefits

• Day one access to health insurance, life insurance, and wellbeing benefits.
• 10 paid holidays per year.
• 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.