About the role#
Our E-commerce Recommendation team builds and scales systems to provide a shopping experience for TikTok users. As a PhD intern, you will contribute to our products and research while collaborating with industry experts. This is a full-time, on-site role based in Seattle.
What you'll do#
- Drive the transition of recommender systems from discriminative to generative paradigms.
- Research generative retrieval and generative re-ranking or blending.
- Improve personalization while optimizing training and inference efficiency of generative models on GPUs.
- Use Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enhance semantic understanding and reasoning.
- Address business challenges like cold start, long-tail item distribution, and user intent.
- Build self-evolving agents to optimize recommender systems and move toward agentic architectures.
- Replace heuristic rule-based systems with LLM and agent capabilities.
- Develop algorithms to measure and optimize long-term value and user experience.
What you'll need#
- Current enrollment in a PhD program for Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, 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 interest in open-ended research.
- Experience in areas such as live commerce, large-scale consumer products, multimodal foundation models, or long-sequence user behavior modeling.
- A track record of publications in conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, ACL, CVPR, SIGIR, or RecSys is preferred.
Location & details#
- Location: Seattle, Washington, United States.
- Modality: On-site.
- Term: 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.
