Machine Learning Engineering Intern – LLM Development

Job Description

Machine Learning Engineer Intern (TikTok Search Local Services) – 2026 Summer (BS/MS) | TikTok

The Tone:
This is a Summer internship at TikTok, a leading destination for short-form mobile video. The company’s mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy globally. This role is crucial within the Data-Search-TikTok-Local Services team, which works to enhance local services by improving how users discover hospitality, dining, and leisure experiences. The intern’s contributions will directly support the refinement of large-scale machine learning systems for search and recommendations, impacting personalized relevance and conversion efficiency for billions of users.

The TL;DR
• Role: Internship
• Type: Full-time
• Location: In-person, location varies
• Pay: $45–$60 hourly
• Team: Data-Search-TikTok-Local Services team
• Mission: Improve user discovery of local services by refining search and recommendation systems using large-scale machine learning for personalized relevance and conversion efficiency.

What You’ll Actually Do
• Improve: Participate in the enhancement of the search core algorithm for local services on TikTok.
• Develop: Build AI search capabilities for local service needs by deploying and post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) and constructing robust Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.
• Enhance: Apply cutting-edge LLM technology to match the most relevant videos for each search query and continuously improve the understanding of queries and relevance in TikTok search.
• Personalize: Solve recommendation problems within search to increase personalization and deepen the understanding of users beyond just relevance.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Currently pursuing a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Experience: Able to commit to working for 12 weeks during Summer 2026. Possesses experience deploying, training LLMs, or building LLM-powered applications.
• Skills: Proficient in coding with Python, Java, Golang, C#, or C++.
• Bonus: Demonstrated software engineering, natural language processing, or deep learning experience from previous internships, work experience, coding competitions, or publications. Exhibits high levels of creativity and quick problem-solving capabilities.