Machine Learning Engineer Intern - Global E-Commerce (Agentic Search) - 2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer Intern - Global E-Commerce (Agentic Search) - 2027 Start (PhD) in Singapore. When: Summer 2027. Posted July 26, 2026. Checked against the employer's posting on November 12, 2026.

Responsibilities About the Team Our team is responsible for the search algorithm for our rapidly growing global e-Commerce business. We use state-of-the-art large-scale machine learning technology, the cutting-edge NLP, CV and multi-modal technology to build the industry's top-class search engine to provide the best e-Commerce search experience, for more than 1 billion monthly users around the world.

Our mission is to build a world where "there is no hard-to-sell good-priced product in the world". We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship.

PhD internships at Our Company provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, as well as to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and professional development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Please clearly state your availability in your resume (Start date, End date).

Responsibilities - Develop algorithms for our next-generation Agentic Search engine, covering the full search pipeline: query understanding, planning, retrieval, ranking, RAG and generation.

The goal is to improve relevance, answer quality and user experience. - Build Agentic Search capabilities such as Search Agent, Deep Search and Deep Research, applying Planning, Tool Use, Multi-hop Retrieval, Grounding, Citation and Self-Verification in real search scenarios.

- Train the Search Foundation Model and build the data–evaluation–training loop. This includes SFT, Preference Learning, RLHF/RLVR, Distillation, Synthetic Data and Long Context, as well as LLM-as-a-Judge and rubric-based automated evaluation built from search logs.

- Work with product and engineering teams to ship intelligent search to hundreds of millions of users. - Follow frontier research in LLMs, Agents, multimodality, RL, Memory and Inference-time Compute.

Qualifications Minimum Qualification(s) - Currently Pursuing a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

- Strong coding skills in C/C++ or Python, and a solid grounding in data structures and algorithms. - Familiar with ML/DL fundamentals (Transformer, Attention, Embedding) and PyTorch.

- Research or project experience in search, recommendation, ads, IR, NLP, LLMs, multimodality or RL. - Strong problem-solving, learning and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualification(s) - In-depth research or project experience in Agentic Search, Deep Research, RAG, LLM Post-Training or RLHF/RLVR. - Publications at top venues such as KDD, SIGIR, WWW, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP or CVPR.

- Awards in competitions such as ACM/ICPC, NOI/IOI or Kaggle. - Experience with large-scale search or recommender systems, distributed training, or LLM inference optimization.

Job Information About TikTok TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy.

TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.