Machine Learning Engineer Intern (E-Commerce Recommendation Mall) - 2027 Start (PhD)

Machine Learning Engineer Intern (E-Commerce Recommendation Mall) - 2027 Start (PhD) at TikTok in Seattle, WA.

Responsibilities

• Our E-commerce Recommendation Team is responsible for building up and scaling our recommendation system to provide the best shopping experience for our TikTok users.
• We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship. PhD internships at Our Company provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, as well as to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.
• Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and professional development events, and collaboration with industry experts.
• Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Please clearly state your availability in your resume (Start date, End date).
• Generative Recommendation Research: Drive the evolution of recommender systems from discriminative to generative paradigms; explore frontier directions such as generative retrieval and generative re-ranking/blending; continuously improve personalization capabilities while deeply optimizing the training and inference efficiency of generative models on GPUs.
• LLM for Recommendation Research: Leverage Large Language Models (LLMs), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and related techniques to enhance the semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities of recommender systems, addressing core business challenges in e-commerce scenarios (e.g., cold start, long-tail item distribution, and user intent understanding).
• Agentic Recommendation Research: Explore the construction of self-evolving agents and leverage agents to continuously optimize recommender systems; drive the evolution of recommender systems toward agentic architectures capable of keenly perceiving user context and making real-time, personalized decisions and adjustments.
• Long-Term Value and User Experience Modeling: Explore replacing traditional heuristic rule-based systems with LLM and agent capabilities; build next-generation algorithms for measuring and optimizing long-term value (LTV) and user experience, enabling sustainable growth of the platform ecosystem.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a PhD in in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or a related discipline.
• Solid foundation in machine learning and deep learning, with research or project experience in at least one of the following areas: large language models, reinforcement learning, generative models, recommender systems or information retrieval.
• Proficient in Python and at least one mainstream deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).

Strong problem-solving skills and passion for tackling complex, open-ended research problems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in recommendation systems, especially in live commerce, e-commerce, search, ads, or other large-scale consumer products.
• Experience with generative recommendation, large recommendation models, retrieval and ranking systems, or related recommendation architecture upgrades.
• Experience with LLMs or multimodal foundation models, including pre-training, post-training, representation learning, contrastive learning, SFT, or RL-based optimization.
• Experience in cross-domain transfer learning, LTV modeling, long-term value optimization, causal inference, or debiasing.
• Experience with long-sequence user behavior modeling, multi-task learning, multi-interest modeling, or large-scale distributed training and inference optimization.
• Publications in top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, ACL, CVPR, SIGIR, or RecSys, or strong achievements in major technical competitions.
• Strong curiosity about new technologies, fast learning ability, and a passion for solving challenging real-world problems.

About the Company

The Global Business Solutions (GBS) team is responsible for the revenue growth of the TikTok business, and our teams include Sales, Marketing, Ops, Account Managers, Agency and partnerships, as well as Marketing Science.

At TikTok, our Global Business Solutions (GBS) team plays a key role in generating revenue by promoting our advertising solutions, onboarding new clients, driving ad campaigns, and more. As the TikTok community grows at an unprecedented speed around the world, our GBS team leads groundbreaking projects that are changing the landscape of the advertising industry in real time.

We're seeking an analytically driven, and detail-oriented Client Solutions Manager (CSM) Intern to join our Ecommerce Team. As a CSM, you will partner closely with Client Partners and Client Solutions Managers to drive revenue by identifying opportunities, leveraging data insights, and delivering consultative solutions for advertisers.

This role centers on client education, relationship growth, data analysis, and campaign success. You will provide strategic recommendations to both clients and internal teams, ensuring campaigns achieve business objectives while optimizing long-term partnerships. Success in this role requires strong data analytics skills, adaptability in a fast-paced environment, and a test-and-learn mindset to uncover the best solutions.