San Jose Technology - Algorithm Global Frontier Tech Program - Intern

Research Scientist Intern – E-commerce Recommendation (LLM Applications)

Location: San Jose

Employment Type: Intern

Job Code: A38740

We are looking for talented PhD students to join our Global E-commerce team in 2027. This internship blends hands‑on learning, community events, and collaboration with industry experts to contribute to our products, research, and emerging technologies.

As part of our Global E-commerce system built on Tik Tok Shop, you will help build advanced recommendation engines, integrated multilingual, multimodal foundation models, and agent frameworks for demand forecasting, traffic allocation, and personalized recommendation.

• Build industry‑leading recommendation systems that improve user experience, content ecosystem, and platform security.
• Explore generative recommendation techniques, including diffusion models, prompt learning, and multimodal content generation.
• Build multi‑modal and cross‑scenario systems enabling unified recommendation across live streams, short videos, and search.
• Deliver end‑to‑end machine learning solutions to address critical product challenges.
• Own the full stack machine learning system and optimize algorithms and infrastructure to improve recommendation performance.
• Work with cross‑functional teams to design product strategies and build solutions to grow Tik Tok in important markets.

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Strong foundation in machine learning, with knowledge of cutting‑edge AI technologies; publications or competition experience are preferred.
• Familiarity with big data frameworks such as Hadoop, Map Reduce, and Spark.
• Experience with Tensor Flow or PyTorch for model training and deployment; understanding of training acceleration techniques such as mixed precision and distributed training.

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of model compression and inference acceleration techniques (quantization, pruning, distillation, Tensor
  
  RT optimization).
• Expertise in at least one of the following areas:
• Computer Vision & Multimodality – research experience, large‑scale multimodal models, integration of LLMs with visual representations.
• Natural Language Processing – research experience with LLMs, pretraining, cross‑lingual learning, NLP model deployment.

Hourly rate: $60–$60.

Interns have day‑one access to health, life insurance, and wellbeing benefits. They receive 10 paid holidays, paid sick time (56 hrs if hired first half of the year, 40 hrs if hired second half), and may be eligible for a housing allowance if not working 100 % remote.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws. The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefit programs at any time.