Machine Learning Engineer Intern (TikTok Eng-AI Innovation Center) - 2025 Summer(PhD)

Tiktok - San Jose, CA

Full-time - Intern

San Jose, CA

Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services

About the position

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video, and our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. The TikTok Eng-AI Innovation Center is at the forefront of exploring cutting-edge AGI technologies, including large language models (LLM) and multi-modal LLMs that encompass video, image, audio, text, and code. Our goal is to enhance content understanding on the TikTok platform, improving user experiences in searching and recommendations while effectively identifying and combating internet abuse and fraud. Additionally, we aim to optimize our codebase through advanced LLMs, making coding more accessible for our engineers. We are seeking talented individuals for a 12-week internship program starting in May/June 2025, where interns will gain hands-on experience and industry exposure while developing fundamental skills and exploring potential career paths. The internship will include a vibrant mix of social events and development workshops, allowing interns to apply their knowledge in real-world scenarios and lay a strong foundation for personal and professional growth. Successful candidates must commit to one of the specified start dates and clearly state their availability in their resumes. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and we encourage early applications.

Responsibilities

• Participate in the design and implementation of a high-availability, scalable, distributed large-model machine learning platform to support the development and efficient iteration of large models for TikTok.
• Explore cutting-edge technologies related to large-model engineering (LLMOps), covering areas such as data processing, model training, inference services, evaluation systems, automated orchestration, prompt engineering, and resource scheduling.

Requirements

• PhD Degree with majors in artificial intelligence, computer science, automation, and mathematics or related fields.
• Able to commit to working for 12 weeks during Summer 2025.
• Experience in LLM or SFT, RL, model architecture modifications, computer vision, or multimodal large models.
• Research experience in the field of machine learning, particularly in large-scale language models (LLMs) and generative AI.
• Excellent problem analysis and solving skills, with a passion for tackling challenging problems.
• Outstanding programming abilities, data structures, and algorithm skills, proficient in C/C++ or Python programming languages.
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment.

Nice-to-haves

• Graduating December 2025 onwards with the intent to return to degree program after the completion of the internship.
• Preference given to those who have published papers in the fields of machine learning (ML), computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), etc. (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL, OSDI, NSDI, SC, and SigMOD, etc.), with practical development experience in LLM.

Benefits

• Hands-on experience in developing fundamental skills.
• Exploration of potential career paths through a vibrant blend of social events and enriching development workshops.