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

@2026 Tik Tok Technology Location: Seattle Employment Type: Intern Job Code: A19929 Share this listing: Responsibilities Our E-commerce Recommendation Team is responsible for building up and scaling our recommendation system to provide the best shopping experience for our Tik Tok 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. 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.

Qualifications

Minimum

Qualifications

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, Tensor Flow, 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 Rec Sys, or strong achievements in major technical competitions. Strong curiosity about new technologies, fast learning ability, and a passion for solving challenging real‑world problems.

Job Information The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $57- $57.

Benefits

may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Interns have day one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits and more. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year).

Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing…