About the role#
The TikTok AI and Visual Search Infrastructure team builds systems for search experiences used globally. We manage infrastructure that handles billions of search requests daily, supporting traditional search, AI-powered results, in-app chatbots, and visual search. You will work on foundational search engine infrastructure and AI search technology, including large-scale indexing, multimodal search, multi-agent engines, and high-performance LLM and VLM platforms.
What you'll do#
- Design, build, and optimize infrastructure for AI and visual search that supports massive online request volumes and offline data processing.
- Evolve the search agent platform, focusing on multi-agent orchestration, tool-calling workflows, RAG engines, and memory management.
- Deploy and optimize LLM and VLM post-training and inference, including GPU acceleration and kernel optimizations.
- Build search engine components like distributed indexing systems and multi-stage retrieval services.
- Develop scalable data pipelines and distributed systems to process trillion-scale text, image, and video datasets.
- Explore emerging technologies in generative search, multimodal understanding, and reinforcement learning.
- Collaborate with machine learning, product, and engineering teams to deliver responsive search experiences.
What you'll need#
- Current pursuit of a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
- Strong programming skills and a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms.
- Proficiency in at least one language such as C++, Java, Python, or Go.
- Familiarity with a Linux development environment.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities with a focus on engineering at scale.
- Effective communication skills and a strong sense of ownership.
- Experience or coursework in LLM/VLM serving, RAG, AI agents, distributed systems, or search engines.
- Understanding of search concepts like indexing, retrieval, ranking, and query understanding.
- Familiarity with LLM serving frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM, or agent frameworks like LangGraph.
- Experience optimizing system performance, including latency, throughput, and memory utilization.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California
- Term: Summer 2027
- Employment type: Full-time intern
- Compensation: $45 - $60 per hour
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
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