Backend Engineer Intern (TikTok Vertical Recommendation Architecture) - 2026 Start (BS/MS)

Team Introduction
Our Recommendation Architecture Team is responsible for building and optimizing the architecture of the recommendation system to provide the most stable and best experience for TikTok users. The team focuses on optimizing the recommendation system architecture, ensuring stability and high availability, and improving the performance of both online services and offline data flows. Collaborating with the algorithm team, we work to enhance recommendation effectiveness and user experience, boost system performance while reducing costs, build data and service mid-platforms, and realize flexible and scalable high-performance storage and computing systems.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in from Sept. 2025 onwards. Internships at TikTok aim to offer students industry exposure and hands-on experience. Watch your ambitions become reality as your inspiration brings infinite opportunities at TikTok.

Candidates can apply to a maximum of two positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you apply. The application limit is applicable to TikTok and its affiliates' jobs globally.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early.
Successful candidates must be able to commit to at least 3 months long internship period.

Responsibilities
- Design and implement reasonable offline data architecture for large-scale recommendation systems.
- Design and implement flexible, scalable, stable and high-performance storage and computing systems.
- Trouble-shooting of the production system, designing and implementing the necessary mechanisms and tools to ensure the stability of the overall operation of the production system.
- 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 visualisation software.
- Apply data mining, data modelling, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract and analyse information from large structured and unstructured datasets.
- Visualise, interpret, and report data findings and may create dynamic data reports as well.

Minimum Qualifications:
- Undergraduate, or Postgraduate who is 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 programming languages: C, C++, Java or Golang.
- Effective communication skills and a sense of ownership and drive.

Preferred Qualifications:
- Experienced in at least one area of the following areas: personalized recommendations system infra (dag engine, ranking, online/offline feature store), search engine, distributed storage system, rpc-frameworks, performance regression (such as perf-CI) is a plus.
- 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.

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

If you have any questions, please reach out to us at apac-earlycareers@tiktok.com