Software Engineer Intern ( Search Data Infra; Fall
Listed on 2026-08-28
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Software Development
Backend Developer, Machine Learning/ ML Engineer, AI Engineer (Applied/Software), Software Engineer
Responsibilities
About the Team
Our Search Engineering Team builds and owns Tik Tok'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 Tik Tok Search runs on data our systems produce.
We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship. 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.
Candidates may apply to a maximum of two positions across Our Company and its affiliates globally. Applications will be considered in the order they are submitted.
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.
Minimum Qualification(s)
- 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.
- 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.
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $45- $45.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Interns have day one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits and more. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year). Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing allowance.
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
- Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
- Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
- Exercising sound judgment.
Tik Tok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At Tik Tok, our mission is to…
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