Software Engineer Intern (Recommendation Infrastructure) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Description

Our Recommendation Architecture Team is responsible for building up and optimizing the architecture for our recommendation products to provide the most reliable and best experience for our TikTok users. Interns are important parts to our team with your fresh ideas and creative thoughts.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2026. Internships at TikTok aim to offer students industry exposure and hands-on experience. Turn your ambitions into reality as your inspiration brings infinite opportunities at TikTok.

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).

Responsibilities
• Build and maintain high performance online services for TikTok recommendation system to support various types of products, such as For You Feed, E-commerce, Social, etc.
• Build extremely efficient and reliable data pipelines for candidates generation, profile generation, training examples generation, realtime online training, etc;
• Build globalized large-scale recommendation system;
• Design and develop high performance computing frameworks and storage systems.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications:
• Currently pursuing PhD in Computer Science or a related technical discipline
• Able to commit to working for 12 weeks during Summer 2026
• Experience in programming, included but not limited to, the following programming languages: C, C++, Java or Python.
• Effective communication skills, self-driven learner, a sense of ownership

Preferred Qualifications
• Projects or research experienced in at least one area of the following areas: personalized recommendations, search engine, machine learning, distributed storage system, big data frameworks is a plus.

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