Software Engineer Intern (ML Infra) - 2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok’s Ads Infra team builds the highly efficient, stable infrastructure that powers machine-learning training, serving, and privacy enforcement for one of the world’s largest advertising platforms. This internship offers hands-on experience with real-world challenges, industry exposure, and opportunities for personal and professional growth through social events, learning programs, and development workshops.

Responsibilities

• Develop and optimize advertising recommendation models, covering training, evaluation, inference, and user-behavior sequence modeling.
• Build large-scale data pipelines for sample generation, feature processing, storage, and data-quality assurance.
• Develop ML platforms for distributed training, model distribution, online serving, and lifecycle management.
• Explore MLLM applications in advertising, including data production, model training, fine-tuning, and inference optimization.
• Apply AI agents to workflow orchestration, resource scheduling, failure diagnosis, and automated operations.
• Build machine-learning platforms for GPU allocation, scheduling, usage metering, cost accounting, and utilization optimization.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related discipline.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language such as C++, Python, Go, or Java.
• Solid knowledge of data structures, algorithms, machine learning, and computer systems.
• Familiarity with recommendation systems, MLLMs, distributed systems, ML platforms, or large-scale data processing.
• Experience with deep-learning frameworks, distributed training, GPU scheduling, AI agents, or cloud-native technologies is a plus.

Benefits

• Day-one access to health insurance, life insurance, and wellbeing benefits.
• 10 paid holidays per year plus 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 (for interns not working 100% remote).

Pay

Hourly rate: $60.