Machine Learning Engineer Intern (-Data-Search-Local Service PhD) San Jose

Discover a career that energizes and excites you every day.

@2026 Tik Tok

Technology

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Intern

Job Code:

A205776A

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Responsibilities

The Search team builds the systems that help users find relevant, reliable, and engaging content across Tik Tok. 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.

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 work streams.

- Communicate progress, risks, and learnings with mentors and stakeholders throughout the internship.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications
- Must be able to commit to a 12-week full-time work.

- Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree 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.

Job Information

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60- $60.

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:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. Exercising sound judgment.

About Tik Tok

Tik Tok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At Tik Tok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. Tik Tok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai,…