Software Engineer Intern (Recommendations and Search) - 2027 Summer

About the role

The Tech and Product team of TikTok USDS is missioned to empower TikTok US users to have a great user experience with strong data security and privacy protections, focusing on compliance, reliability, business and product support, and efficiency improvement. As part of this team, you will build and scale high-impact Machine Learning solutions—including recommendation engines, search relevance, and e-commerce systems—designed specifically to deliver personalized, high-performing experiences while ensuring world-class data governance, privacy compliance, and system security for US users.

Responsibilities

• Optimize the searching quality to provide TikTok's users the best recommendations and search experience
• Combine your understanding of product objectives and take full advantage of modern machine learning and information retrieval techniques to improve recommendations/search quality and perception
• Build the core systems and algorithms development including query understanding, result ranking, query recommendation, system reliability, and etc.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Able to commit to a 12-week internship during Summer 2027.
• Experience in developing and implementing large-scale consumer-facing services/products and/or building backend services for large-scale consumer-facing applications
• Proficiency in the following languages but not limited to: C/C++, Python, Java or Golang
• Effective team communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Working knowledge in one of the following or similar domains: search, recommendation, ranking, ads, etc.
• Working knowledge in one of the following areas: machine learning, deep learning, backend, large-scale systems, data science, full-stack
• Experience with Big Data Frameworks, such as hadoop, spark, flink, etc.

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)
• Housing allowance for interns not working 100% remote

Pay

The hourly rate range for this position is $42.75–$42.75.

Schedule

12‑week internship during Summer 2027; the company is shifting to a fully in‑person schedule of up to 5 days per week.