Machine Learning Engineer Intern (E-commerce-Recommendation) - 2026 Start (PhD)

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 our team in 2026. As a graduate, you will get unparalleled opportunities for you to kickstart your career, pursue bold ideas and explore limitless growth opportunities. Co-create a future driven by your inspiration with TikTok. PhD internships at ByteDance provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early. Please state your availability clearly in your resume (Start date, End date).

• Work in a team to conduct cutting-edge research in machine learning algorithms, such as retrieval and recommendation algorithms;
• Participate in building large-scale (10 million to 100 million) e-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems, including commodity recommendations, live stream recommendations, short video recommendations etc in TikTok;
• Build long and short term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of various data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently;
• Apply machine learning algorithms to improve the different business scenarios, such as search ranking, natural language and video understanding, and trust and safety.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing PhD in Computer Science, related technical field or equivalent industrial research experience;
• Experience in one of the following fields: recommendation systems, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields preferred;
• Familiar with at least one of the mainstream deep learning frameworks, such as TensorFlow or PyTorch;
• Passionate about solving complex and challenging problems;
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment.

By submitting an application for this role, you accept and agree to our global applicant privacy policy, which may be accessed here: https://jobs.bytedance.com/en/legal/privacy

Job Information

About Us：

Founded in 2012, ByteDance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, ByteDance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.​

Why Join ByteDance：

Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.​

As ByteDancers, we strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our Company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.​

Diversity & Inclusion​

ByteDance is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.​

Reasonable Accommodation：

ByteDance is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern：

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $72- $72. ​

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 allowance.​

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.​

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:​

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:​

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;​

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and​

3. Exercising sound judgment.​

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