Machine Learning Engineer Intern (TikTok-Data-Search-Local Service) - 2027 Start (PhD)

PhD internship with the Search team, which builds the systems that power TikTok’s global search experience—covering retrieval, ranking, recommendation signals, query understanding, relevance, infrastructure, and product interfaces.

About the role

This internship blends hands-on product development with professional growth. Interns actively contribute to live projects, collaborate with cross-functional partners, and participate in community-building and skill-development events.

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 analyze user search behavior and improve product or system quality.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, data science, and machine-learning teams 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 completing or recently completed a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Proficient coding skills and strong foundation in algorithms and data structures.
• Effective communication and teamwork skills.
• Experience in one or more of the following areas: NLP, ranking, ads, search engines, recommender systems, distributed systems, or machine learning.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on 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.