About the role#
The Global E-Commerce Content Recommendation team builds the recommendation stack for e-commerce video and image-text content. We are rebuilding this stack on LLM foundations to serve a billion-scale user base. This PhD internship offers the chance to contribute to research and product development while working alongside industry experts.
What you'll do#
- Build and rewrite an industrial recommendation system covering retrieval, ranking, and blending.
- Scale recommendation models like LLMs to billions of parameters while managing strict latency budgets.
- Develop one-stage generative retrieval by tokenizing item spaces and training autoregressive models.
- Integrate world knowledge using large models to identify latent user interests and semantic representations.
- Optimize training and inference by developing custom CUDA or Triton kernels and accelerating distributed training.
- Use coding agents to automate feature mining, experiment configuration, and pipeline generation.
- Conduct original research on open problems such as long-term value modeling, repurchase, and retention.
What you'll need#
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
- Strong fundamentals in machine learning and engineering, including clean, efficient code and data structures.
- Research or engineering experience in LLMs, foundation models, NLP, CV, RL, or recommendation systems.
- Ability to define and decompose complex problems.
- Enthusiasm for applying frontier methods to production environments.
- Preferred: Publications at top venues like KDD, SIGIR, RecSys, or NeurIPS.
- Preferred: Experience with LLM post-training, inference acceleration, or agent-system construction.
- Preferred: Background in competitive programming or data science competitions like Kaggle.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California, United States.
- Modality: On-site.
- Employment: Full-time internship.
- Hiring process: Rolling basis.
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.
