About the role#
The Business Integrity team builds systems to ensure reliable and high-performing monetization platforms. As a Research Engineer Intern, you will help develop a next-generation content understanding system. Your work will focus on creating an ecosystem that balances user experience with advertiser value.
What you'll do#
- Build a moderation system that provides accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and intelligent remediation.
- Aim for fully automated moderation that exceeds current human performance benchmarks.
- Develop highly scalable machine learning models.
- Grow your understanding of the business and collaborate with global teams across different disciplines.
What you'll need#
- Currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field, with graduation expected within 12 months. Exceptional Bachelor's candidates with strong research output will also be considered.
- Hands-on experience training or deploying models in areas such as Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies.
- Familiarity with large language model fundamentals, including pre-training, fine-tuning, prompting, and inference, with practical experience in at least one stage.
- Strong software engineering skills, including writing clean, testable code and debugging complex systems.
- Proficiency in Python and at least one deep learning framework like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- A collaborative mindset and a genuine interest in applying AI to real-world products.
- Preferred experience includes large-scale distributed training, production model deployment, data pipeline construction, agentic systems, or RAG pipelines.
- Open-source contributions, success in ML competitions, or granted patents are a plus.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California
- Term: Summer 2027
- Modality: On-site
- Employment: Full-time internship
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.
