Machine Learning Engineer Intern - E-Commerce Recommendation/Search Alliance - 2027 Start - PhD

The E-commerce Alliance team connects merchants and creators across the TikTok Shop ecosystem. It builds intelligent and automated affiliate operation tools and provides creators with personalized product recommendations. The team works on large-scale recommendation and search systems, intelligent affiliate operations, creator and product understanding, and machine learning solutions. PhD internships provide students the opportunity to contribute to products, research, future plans, and emerging technologies. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. Applicants should clearly state their availability, including start and end dates, in their resume. ## Responsibilities - Design and build machine learning, recommendation, and ranking algorithms for large-scale e-commerce recommendation systems that deliver high-quality, real-time product recommendations. - Develop AI-powered merchant operation systems and AI agents to help merchants optimize affiliate strategies, improve business ROI, and grow their businesses through automation. - Apply LLMs, NLP, and multimodal machine learning to discover business opportunities and drive sustainable growth for merchants and creators. - Collaborate with product managers, engineers, and cross-functional teams to bring AI solutions from research to production. - Prototype and productionize advances in AI and machine learning. - Build ML agents to automate algorithm development workflows, including experimentation, model iteration, evaluation, and deployment. ## Minimum Qualifications - Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Operations Research, or a related technical discipline. - Strong grasp of data structures and algorithms, with strong problem-solving skills. - Profound knowledge of machine learning, statistics, and big data engineering. ## Preferred Qualifications - Thorough understanding of data structures and algorithms, with excellent problem-solving ability. - Deep understanding of machine learning, statistics, scaling distributed computing, and big data engineering. ## Compensation and Benefits Hourly pay for the selected city is $60. Interns have 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 or 40 hours if hired in the second half). Interns who are not working 100% remotely may also be eligible for a housing allowance. Benefits may vary based on employment and work location.