About the role#
As a Project Intern on the E-Commerce Engineering team, you will work on distributed systems and information retrieval challenges. You will contribute to projects that support the global search infrastructure for TikTok Shop. This is a 12-week full-time internship.
What you'll do#
- Design and develop high-performance, low-latency, and high-availability online search services.
- Optimize core components including the inverted index, vector retrieval (ANN/HNSW), and query understanding.
- Build highly scalable and fault-tolerant data pipelines using Flink, Kafka, and Spark.
- Drive latency and throughput optimizations for services handling hundreds of thousands of QPS.
- Troubleshoot complex distributed system issues to ensure 99.99% availability.
- Participate in the research and implementation of next-generation search infrastructure, focusing on storage decoupling, cloud-native architecture, AI Search, and multi-modal fusion.
- Work with your mentor and ML engineers to productionize state-of-the-art models and build globalized large-scale recommendation systems.
What you'll need#
- Currently pursuing a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Development, or a related technical discipline.
- Ability to commit to a 12-week full-time work period during Fall 2026.
- Solid programming proficiency in at least one language: C++, Go, Java, or Python. C++ or Go is preferred.
- Strong foundation in computer science, specifically data structures, algorithms, and system design.
- Experience with search engines like Lucene, Elasticsearch, or Vespa.
- Experience with distributed storage like RocksDB or Redis, or big data frameworks like Flink, Spark, and Kafka.
- Demonstrated software engineering experience from previous internships, open-source contributions, or competitive programming.
- Familiarity with information retrieval concepts like BM25 and learning-to-rank, or vector similarity search like FAISS and HNSW.
Location & details#
- Location: Seattle, Washington, United States
- Term: Fall 2026
- Modality: On-site
- Compensation: $42.75 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
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.
