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

Description

Team Introduction
Our Search Engineering Team is responsible for building and owning TikTok's search engine which can provide our users with the best search experience. In TikTok Search Team, you’ll have the opportunity to build full-stack search engine system and combine information retrieval technology with modern machine learning methods from related fields such as NLP, CV, and recommender system. We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2026. PhD Internships at TikTok aim to provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

PhD internships at TikTok provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early. Please state your availability clearly in your resume (Start date, End date).

This internship provides students the opportunity to join one of our engineering teams where you will have the opportunity to:
Participate in the improvement of the search core algorithm, possible directions include:
• Content understanding: Applying the industry's cutting-edge NLP and CV technology and leveraging LLM to match the most relevant videos for each search query, and continuously improve the relevance of TikTok search.
• User Behavior Modeling: solving the recommendation problem in search, let TikTok search increase the ability of personalization on the basis of "relevant", and understand users better.
• Video understanding: comprehensive use of NLP, CV, as well as LLM for better video understanding from the perspective of the video itself and social network, improve authority, credibility, and usefulness of search results.

Requirements

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
• Demonstrated software engineering experience from previous internship, work experience, coding competitions, or publications.
• High levels of creativity and quick problem-solving capabilities.

Privacy Statement
By submitting an application for this role, you accept and agree to our global applicant privacy policy, which may be accessed here: https://careers.tiktok.com/legal/privacy