About the role#
The Global E-Commerce Content Recommendation team manages the end-to-end recommendation stack for TikTok Shop. We are rebuilding our recommendation infrastructure using Large Language Model foundations to serve a billion-scale user base. This internship offers the opportunity to work on production-level systems that directly impact user experience and e-commerce performance.
What you'll do#
- Scale recommendation models, including LLMs, by pushing parameters into the billions while maintaining strict latency requirements.
- Develop one-stage generative retrieval systems that replace traditional multi-channel funnels with autoregressive models.
- Integrate world knowledge and reasoning models to better capture latent user interests and long-horizon intent.
- Optimize training and inference by developing custom CUDA or Triton kernels and focusing on distributed training and high-performance deployment.
- Build and utilize coding agents to automate feature mining, experiment configuration, and pipeline generation.
- Conduct original research on open problems such as long-term value modeling, retention, and interest exploration.
What you'll need#
- Current enrollment in an undergraduate program for Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
- Strong understanding of machine learning math, algorithms, and data structures.
- Ability to write clean, efficient, and reproducible code.
- Deep research or engineering experience in at least one area: LLMs, NLP, computer vision, reinforcement learning, or recommendation systems.
- Ability to explain design choices and identify limitations in your work.
- Enthusiasm for moving frontier methods into production environments.
- Experience in areas such as LLM post-training, agent-system construction, or large-scale distributed training is a plus.
- A track record of high-quality open-source work, technical publications, or competitive programming awards is preferred.
Location & details#
- Location: Seattle, Washington, United States
- Term: Summer 2027
- Employment: Full-time intern
- Modality: On-site
About TikTok
TikTok operates as an entertainment provider. The company maintains a global presence with offices in cities including Los Angeles, Singapore, New York, London, and Tokyo. It employs over 92,000 people. The organization is privately held.
How to get in at TikTok
Landing an internship at TikTok requires speed because early applicants often get seen before the pile grows. Intern Insider sends an instant alert the moment a role matching your target is published anywhere, so you can apply among the first. This gives you a better chance of your resume being reviewed while the team is still actively filling the position. You should aim to be one of the first people to submit your materials. Reaching out to the right person can also improve your chances of getting a response. Intern Insider surfaces the recruiters behind the company roles so you can contact them directly to ask about the role or a referral. This direct approach often works better than waiting for a response from a general application queue.
