Machine Learning Engineer Intern (E-Commerce User Growth) - 2027 Summer

Responsibilities

• Participate in optimizing TikTok e-commerce growth and marketing algorithms, including core capabilities such as user value modelling, personalized messaging, recommendations, and intelligent marketing.
• Establish a user lifecycle data and value system to address core pain points and business challenges related to TikTok Mall user growth.
• Contribute to the implementation of product and technical solutions for user growth engines, such as personalized push notifications/emails, recommendation handling, etc., to increase e-commerce DAU and penetration rates.
• Optimize algorithms related to recall/sorting for new user recommendations, improving the relevance of traffic source handling and the accuracy and diversity of new user recommendations.
• Optimize intelligent marketing algorithms, utilizing uplift models and operations research methods to improve marketing efficiency and drive e-commerce GMV growth.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing an Undergraduate degree in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related discipline.
• Solid ML and engineering fundamentals: you understand the math behind the models, and you write clean, efficient, reproducible code with a strong command of algorithms and data structures.
• Deep research or engineering practice in at least one of: LLMs / foundation models, NLP, CV, RL, or recommendation / search / ads — and you can articulate why you made the choices you made, and where they fell short.
• Genuine enthusiasm for LLM / LRM techniques: you want frontier methods live in production, not parked at offline metrics.
• Strong problem definition and decomposition: faced with an ambiguous problem that has no standard answer, you find your own foothold.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Candidates who have published papers in top AI conferences/journals or achieved notable results in ACM/Machine Learning competitions.
• Experience in recommendation systems, advertising, user growth, intelligent marketing, or related fields, with expertise in LTV estimation, uplift modelling, operations research, sequence modelling, or multi-scenario modelling optimization is a plus.

Benefits

• Day‑one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits.
• 10 paid holidays per year.
• Paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year).
• Housing allowance for interns who are not working 100% remote.

Pay

Hourly rate: $42.75.