Responsibilities
About the Team: Search is no longer just a feature-it is the defining battleground that will determine whether TikTok Shop becomes the first truly global e-commerce super-app. Our Search platform is the core engine behind the "shelf-field" (product card) strategy, and the key to competing head-to-head with Amazon, Taobao, and Pinduoduo in a global market worth over $10 trillion. Search will propel TikTok Shop from tens of billions to hundreds of billions in annual GMV by activating real shopping intent, unlocking zero-sales products, and ensuring every item becomes instantly discoverable the moment a user types or taps. We innovate where extreme performance, massive global scale, and uncompromising consistency meet. As a Project Intern, you will contribute to impactful short-term projects and gain hands-on experience in a fast-paced, professional environment. This internship offers the opportunity to develop practical skills, apply your knowledge to real-world challenges, and explore your career interests. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Responsibilities: During this internship, you will join the E-Commerce Engineering team to tackle challenges in distributed systems and information retrieval. You will: - Core Architecture: Design and develop high-performance, low-latency, and high-availability online search services. Optimize core components including the inverted index, vector retrieval (ANN/HNSW), and query understanding. - Data Pipelines: Build highly scalable and fault-tolerant data pipelines using Flink, Kafka, and Spark to ensure product changes (price, stock, and new listings) are reflected in search results in near real-time. - System Optimization: Drive latency and throughput optimizations for services handling hundreds of thousands of QPS. Troubleshoot complex distributed system issues to ensure 99.99% availability. - Innovation: Participate in the research and implementation of next-generation search infrastructure, focusing on storage decoupling, cloud-native architecture, AI Search, and multi-modal fusion. - Collaboration: Work with your mentor and ML engineers to productionize state-of-the-art models and build globalized large-scale recommendation systems.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications: - Currently pursuing a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Development, or a related technical discipline. - Must be able to commit to a 12-week full-time work period during Fall 2026. - Solid programming proficiency in at least one general-purpose language: C++, Go, Java, or Python (C++/Go is heavily preferred for Infra roles). - Strong foundation in computer science, specifically data structures, algorithms, and system design. Preferred Qualifications: - Distributed Systems: Experience with search engines (e.g., Lucene, Elasticsearch, Vespa), distributed storage (RocksDB, Redis), or big data frameworks (Flink, Spark, Kafka). - Problem Solving: Demonstrated software engineering experience from previous internships, open-source contributions, or competitive programming (e.g., ACM-ICPC). - Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with information retrieval concepts (BM25, learning-to-rank) or vector similarity search (FAISS, HNSW).
Job Information
[For Pay Transparency]Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $42.75- $42.75.
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.
