About the role#
The E-commerce Recommendation team builds and scales systems to shape the shopping experience for users. This internship offers hands-on experience with real-world challenges, industry exposure, and opportunities to work alongside professionals on large-scale systems.
What you'll do#
- Drive the transition of recommender systems from discriminative to generative paradigms by exploring generative retrieval and re-ranking.
- Optimize the training and inference efficiency of generative models on GPUs.
- Use LLMs and reinforcement learning to improve the semantic understanding and reasoning of recommendation systems.
- Address e-commerce challenges like cold starts, long-tail item distribution, and user intent.
- Build self-evolving agents that perceive user context to make real-time, personalized decisions.
- Replace heuristic rule-based systems with LLM and agent capabilities.
- Develop algorithms to measure and optimize long-term value and user experience to support platform growth.
What you'll need#
- Current pursuit of an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Development, or a related field.
- A solid foundation in machine learning and deep learning.
- Research or project experience in LLMs, reinforcement learning, generative models, recommender systems, or information retrieval.
- Proficiency in Python and at least one deep learning framework like PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
- Strong problem-solving skills and an interest in complex, open-ended research.
- Experience in recommendation systems for live commerce, ads, or large-scale consumer products is preferred.
- Familiarity with multimodal foundation models, long-sequence user behavior modeling, or large-scale distributed training is a plus.
- Publications in top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, KDD, or RecSys, or success in major technical competitions are highly valued.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California.
- Modality: On-site.
- Employment Type: Full-time intern.
- Compensation: $45 per hour.
- Program: Rolling applications for 2027 start.
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.
