Software Engineer Intern (Data Ecosystem) - 2026 Summer (BS/MS)

About the role

The TikTok Data Ecosystem Team has the vital role of crafting and implementing a storage solution for offline data in TikTok's recommendation system, which caters to more than a billion users. Their primary objectives are to guarantee system reliability, uninterrupted service, and seamless performance. They aim to create a storage and computing infrastructure that can adapt to various data sources within the recommendation system, accommodating diverse storage needs. Their ultimate goal is to deliver efficient, affordable data storage with easy-to-use data management tools for the recommendation, search, and advertising functions.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement real-time and offline data architecture for large-scale recommendation systems.
• Build scalable and high-performance streaming Lakehouse systems that power feature pipelines, model training, and real-time inference.
• Collaborate with ML platform teams to support PyTorch-based model training workflows and design efficient data formats and access patterns for large-scale samples and features.
• Own core components of our distributed storage and processing stack, from file format to stream compaction to metadata management.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing an Undergraduate/Master in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
• Able to commit to working for 12 weeks during Summer 2026.
• Familiarity with modern Lakehouse technologies such as Apache Paimon, Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Hudi, especially around incremental ingestion, schema evolution, and snapshot isolation.
• Experience in designing and optimizing Flink + Paimon architectures for unified batch/stream processing (preferred).
• Familiarity with feature storage and training data pipelines, and their integration with PyTorch, especially for large-scale model training (preferred).
• Knowledge of columnar file formats (Parquet, ORC, Lance) and how they are used in feature engineering or ML data loading (preferred).
• Proficiency in Java/Scala/C++, and strong debugging/performance tuning ability (preferred).
• Previous experience in Lakehouse metadata management, compaction scheduling, or data versioning (preferred).
• Solid understanding of Apache Flink internals, with hands-on experience in state management, connectors, or UDFs (preferred).

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】
Compensation Description (Hourly): - Campus Intern
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $42.75- $42.75.
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. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year). Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing allowance.
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

TikTok Accommodation

TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request.