Backend Engineer Intern (TikTok Recommendation Architecture) - 2026 Start (BS/MS)
Summary
Intern on TikTok’s Recommendation Architecture team, designing scalable systems and optimizing large-scale recommendation infrastructure using C/C++/Java/Golang.
Internship at TikTok – Recommendation Architecture Team
Responsibilities
The Recommendation Architecture Team builds and optimizes the architecture of the recommendation system to provide the most stable experience for TikTok users. Interns will help:
- Design and implement a reasonable offline data architecture for large‑scale recommendation systems.
- Design and implement flexible, scalable, stable, and high‑performance storage and computing systems.
- Investigate and troubleshoot production system issues and build mechanisms and tools to ensure overall operational stability.
- Build industry‑leading distributed systems such as storage and computing to provide reliable infrastructure for massive data and large‑scale business systems.
- Develop and implement techniques and analytics applications to transform raw data into meaningful information using data‑oriented programming languages and visualization software.
- Apply data mining, data modeling, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract and analyze information from large structured and unstructured datasets.
- Visualize, interpret, and report data findings and create dynamic data reports.
Qualifications
Minimum qualifications:
- Undergraduate or postgraduate student currently pursuing a degree/master in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical major.
- Experience programming in C, C++, Java, or Golang.
- Effective communication skills and a sense of ownership and drive.
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience in personalized recommendation system infrastructure (dag engine, ranking, online/offline feature store), search engine, distributed storage system, RPC frameworks, performance regression (e.g. perf-CI).
- 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.
Internship will begin in September 2025 and last at least three months.
By submitting an application for this role, you accept and agree to our global applicant privacy policy, which may be accessed here: https://careers.tiktok.com/legal/privacy.
Questions can be directed to apac-earlycareers@tiktok.com.