Backend Engineer Intern (TikTok Live Recommendation Architecture) - 2026 Start (BS/MS) Singapor[...]
Summary
Build and optimize scalable backend systems for TikTok Live’s recommendation architecture, including high-performance services, data pipelines, and storage frameworks.
Our TikTok Live Recommendation Architecture Team is responsible for building and optimizing the architecture for the live broadcast recommendation system to provide the most stable and best experience for our users. The team focuses on system stability and high availability, online services and offline data flow performance optimization, solving system bottlenecks, reducing cost overhead, building data and service mid-platform, and realizing flexible and scalable high-performance storage and computing systems. We work closely with applied machine learning engineers to build scalable systems to support all kinds of innovative algorithms and techniques.
Internships at TikTok aim to offer students industry exposure and hands‑on experience. Interns join us from September 2025 onwards. Candidates must be able to commit to at least a 3‑month internship period.
Responsibilities- Build and maintain high-performance online services for the TikTok Live Recommendation System.
- Build extremely efficient and reliable data pipelines for candidate generation, profile generation, training example generation, real-time online training, etc.
- Build globalized large‑scale recommendation systems.
- Design and develop high‑performance computing frameworks and storage systems.
- Analyze user needs and develop software solutions applying principles of computer science, engineering, and mathematical analysis.
- Update software, enhance existing capabilities, and develop and direct software testing and validation procedures.
- Undergraduate or postgraduate currently pursuing a degree/master in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical major.
- Experience programming in at least one of the following languages: C, C++, Java, or Golang.
- Effective communication skills and a sense of ownership and drive.
- Experience in personalized recommendations, search engine, machine learning, distributed storage systems, or big data frameworks.
- Agile, quick self‑learner, highly self‑motivated with a strong sense of product ownership and creative problem‑solver.
- Good collaborator and team player, comfortable working in a fast-moving, culturally diverse, and globally distributed team environment.