Software Engineer Intern (TikTok Search Data Infra) - 2027 Fall

Our Search Engineering Team builds and owns TikTok's search engine, combining information retrieval with modern machine learning from NLP, CV, and recommender systems. We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving. The Data Infrastructure team owns the data layer: how billions of videos and articles are ingested and indexed, how features are computed and served, how petabytes of user actions and features become training data, and how long sequences are modeled. Every retrieval and ranking model in TikTok Search runs on data our systems produce.

Our internship program offers students hands-on experience, industry exposure, and opportunities to apply their knowledge to real-world challenges while building a strong foundation for personal and professional growth. Interns will gain practical experience, explore potential career paths, and participate in social events, learning programs, and development workshops alongside industry professionals.

Responsibilities

• Build and own query/video pipelines — ingestion, enrichment, and streaming/batch index construction at billion-doc scale with near-real-time freshness.
• Develop the feature engineering platform: computation, backfill, storage, and serving, with strong online/offline consistency guarantees.
• Build streaming and batch sample pipelines that turn user actions and features into high-quality training data.
• Improve data quality, observability, and cost efficiency across PB-scale storage and compute.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
• Strong programming skills in Java, C++, or Python.
• Production experience with data frameworks such as Spark, Flink, or Hive/Iceberg.
• Solid distributed systems fundamentals, and the ability to debug and optimize complex systems in production.

Preferred Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
• Experience with search, recommendation, or ads data infrastructure.
• Experience with feature stores and training sample pipelines.
• Familiarity with real-time indexing, inverted index, or embedding/vector retrieval pipelines.
• Experience using AI coding assistants and agents to improve day-to-day development productivity.

Benefits

• Day one access to health insurance, life insurance, and wellbeing benefits.
• 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half).
• Housing allowance for interns who are not working 100% remote.

Pay

The hourly rate for this position is $45.