Machine Learning Engineer Intern - TikTok Shop Global E-Commerce Recommendation

About the Team

The e-commerce sector is rapidly expanding, aiming to connect customers with exceptional sellers and high-quality products via TikTok Shop. This includes live-streaming commerce, short video commerce, and advanced commodity recommendations. Our team consists of applied machine learning experts and data scientists dedicated to innovating in e-commerce recommendation systems. We develop cutting-edge algorithms and solutions that enhance user engagement and drive business success by tackling real-world e-commerce challenges at scale.

Internship Opportunity

We are inviting talented candidates to join us for a part-time internship starting in 2026. This internship will provide valuable industry exposure and practical experience in applying large-scale machine learning to e-commerce. Applicants may apply for up to two roles at TikTok and its affiliates worldwide, and applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, so early application is recommended. Successful interns must commit to a minimum duration of three months.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and implement large-scale recommendation algorithms and systems serving 10 to 100 million users, covering commodity, live stream, and short video recommendations on TikTok.
• Create models capturing both short-term and long-term user interests by analyzing extensive and diverse datasets to uncover users’ latent preferences efficiently.
• Design, build, evaluate, and refine predictive models for candidate generation and ranking tasks, including click-through rate and conversion rate prediction, with a focus on real-time data pipelines, feature engineering, and improving model performance.
• Construct tools to support development and debugging processes as necessary.
• Contribute to the deployment of scalable and optimized AI and machine learning models in production environments.
• Develop algorithms for extraction, transformation, and loading of large volumes of real-time, unstructured data to facilitate deployment of AI/ML solutions derived from theoretical models.
• Conduct experiments to evaluate model effectiveness post-deployment and troubleshoot issues as they arise.
• Collaborate in a team setting utilizing statistical knowledge, scripting, and programming skills aligned with organizational needs.
• Engage with relevant software platforms for deploying machine learning models.

Qualifications

• Current undergraduate or postgraduate student pursuing a degree in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Strong foundations in programming and problem-solving capabilities.
• Hands-on experience in applied machine learning, familiar with algorithms such as Collaborative Filtering, Matrix Factorization, Factorization Machines, Word2vec, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting Trees, Deep Neural Networks, Wide & Deep models, etc.
• Proficiency with deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Experience coding in at least one language such as C++, Python, or an equivalent.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in recommendation systems, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, or large-scale data mining.
• Published research in leading conferences/journals (KDD, NeurIPS, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, RECSYS), or participation in data mining/machine learning competitions such as Kaggle or KDD-cup.

Diversity & Inclusion

We are dedicated to fostering an inclusive environment where all employees are valued for their unique perspectives and experiences. TikTok's mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy, and we strive to reflect the diversity of the communities we serve by celebrating a broad range of voices.