Machine Learning Engineer Intern (TikTok-Data-Search-Basic Ranking) - 2027 Start (PhD)

PhD internship with the Search team, which builds the systems that power user discovery across TikTok—spanning retrieval, ranking, recommendation signals, query understanding, relevance, infrastructure, and product experiences.

About the role

This internship blends hands-on engineering with professional development and community-building events. Interns actively contribute to live products and emerging technologies while collaborating with industry experts.

Responsibilities

• Support the design, implementation, testing, and iteration of Search features, services, or tools under the guidance of engineers and mentors.
• Work with large-scale data, logs, metrics, or experiments to understand user search behavior and improve product or system quality.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, data science, and machine learning partners to define requirements and deliver project milestones.
• Write clear, maintainable code and documentation for assigned workstreams.
• Communicate progress, risks, and learnings with mentors and stakeholders throughout the internship.

Requirements

• Must be able to commit to a 12-week full-time internship.
• Currently pursuing a PhD 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 one or more of the following areas: NLP, Ranking, Ads, search engine, recommender system, distributed system, and machine learning.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with search, recommendation, machine learning, information retrieval, natural language processing, ranking, ads, content understanding, or data mining projects.
• Familiarity with databases, distributed systems, data pipelines, experimentation, or large-scale backend services.
• Experience using data to investigate product, user, or system problems.
• Ability to communicate technical ideas clearly and collaborate with cross-functional partners.
• Interest in improving search experiences for large-scale consumer products.

Pay

Hourly rate: $60.

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 hours if hired in the second half).
• Eligibility for housing allowance if not working 100% remote.