Software Development Intern, Ads Machine Learning

Job Description

About the Company

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video, with a core mission to inspire creativity and bring joy. The company’s global headquarters are located in Los Angeles and Singapore, complemented by offices in major cities such as New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Joining TikTok means being part of a team that creates value for communities, inspires creativity, and brings joy every day. The company fosters a culture of curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech environment. They emphasize resilience, embracing challenges as opportunities to learn and innovate, and maintaining an “Always Day 1” mindset to achieve meaningful breakthroughs.

TikTok is deeply committed to Diversity & Inclusion, striving to create an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Their workplace aims to reflect the diverse communities their platform reaches globally. The company also provides reasonable accommodations in recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs, or other protected reasons.

Job Description: TikTok Ads Creative & Ecosystem Team Internship (2025)

This internship is with the TikTok Ads Creative & Ecosystem team, whose mission is to address the challenge of creating engaging ad experiences. They achieve this by building industry-leading tech solutions for understanding, producing, generating, and optimizing ad creatives and landing pages. The team aims to empower advertisers, creators, and third-party partners to deliver the best engaging creative experiences to end-users, making their work central to TikTok and creator monetization. Examples of their innovative work include the TikTok video editor, AI-powered smart video generation (including exploration of AIGC), and TikTok creative exchange (a marketplace connecting advertisers with creators/agencies).

About the Internship Program:

Internships at TikTok offer students significant industry exposure and hands-on experience, fostering the development of fundamental skills and exploration of potential career paths. The program provides a vibrant blend of social events and enriching development workshops. Interns will apply their knowledge in real-world scenarios, building a strong foundation for personal and professional growth. This is a 12-week program beginning in May/June 2025. Successful candidates must be able to commit to one of the following start dates:
• Monday, May 12
• Monday, May 19
• Tuesday, May 27 (Memorial Day May 26)
• Monday, June 9
• Monday, June 23

Applicants are required to clearly state their availability (Start date, End date) in their resume.

Responsibilities:

As an intern on the TikTok Ads Creative & Ecosystem team, your responsibilities will include:
• Participating in the development of a large-scale Ads system.
• Engaging in the development and iteration of Ads algorithms using Machine Learning. This includes areas like ads query understanding, ads targeting, ads ranking, and ensuring model serving reliability. You will also explore, develop, and experiment with new features to improve model accuracy.
• Partnering with product managers and the product strategy & operation team to define product strategy and features.

Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:
• Currently pursuing a BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or other relevant majors.
• Solid programming skills in languages such as Go, C/C++, and Python.
• Familiarity with basic data structures and algorithms.
• Proficiency in a Linux development environment.
• Strong analytical thinking capability and essential knowledge/skills in statistics.
• Good theoretical grounding in machine learning and deep learning concepts and techniques (e.g., CNN, RNN, LSTM).
• Familiarity with the architecture and implementation of at least one mainstream machine learning programming framework (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet).
• Strong communication and teamwork skills.
• A passion for technologies and solving challenging problems.

Preferred Qualifications:
• Strong understanding of recommender systems, including collaborative filtering, content-based methods, matrix factorization, deep learning approaches, and key metrics (e.g., CTR, CVR, ROI) and personalization techniques in online model prediction.
• Experience with large-scale data processing and machine learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, Spark, or Hadoop) to build and deploy scalable recommendation models.
• Proficiency in programming with C++, Python, and Golang for developing high-performance recommendation engines, optimizing system performance, and building scalable backend services.
• Strong data analysis and model debugging abilities, including diagnosing model performance issues, analyzing user behavior data, and improving system effectiveness based on insights from A/B testing and offline evaluation metrics.

Compensation and Benefits:

The hourly rate range for this Campus Intern position is $45 – $60. Benefits may vary based on employment nature and country. Interns receive day-one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, 10 paid holidays per year, and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in the first half of the year, 40 if hired in the second half of the year). The company reserves the right to modify these benefits.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered in accordance with federal, state, and local laws, including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. The company believes criminal history may directly and negatively relate to specific job duties, potentially leading to the withdrawal of a conditional offer. These duties include interacting with clients/colleagues (sometimes unsupervised), handling confidential information, and exercising sound judgment.