Machine Learning Engineer Intern (TikTok-Data-Search-Search Quality) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Location: San Jose, California, United States of America Department: R&D

The Search team builds the systems that help users find relevant, reliable, and engaging content across TikTok. The team works across search retrieval, ranking, recommendation signals, query understanding, relevance, infrastructure, and product experiences. Our work combines large-scale machine learning, data-driven product development, and distributed systems to improve search quality for a global user base.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship. PhD internships at Our Company provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, as well as to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and professional development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Please clearly state your availability in your resume (Start date, End date).

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 understand user search behavior and improve product or system quality.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, data science, and machine learning partners 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.

Minimum Qualifications

• Must be able to commit to a 12-week full-time work.
• Currently pursuing a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Proficient coding skills and strong algorithm & data structure basis.
• Effective communication and teamwork skills.
• Experience in one or more of the following areas: NLP, Ranking, Ads, search engine, recommender system, distributed system, and machine learning.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.