Software Engineer Intern (TikTok AI Search & Visual Search Infra Team) - 2027 Summer

Public source summary from intern-list.com / Jobright.

TikTok is a short-form mobile video platform seeking a Software Engineer Intern for its AI and Visual Search Infrastructure team. The intern will design, build, and optimize large-scale search, AI agent, RAG, distributed systems, and LLM/VLM infrastructure while collaborating with engineering, research, machine learning, and product teams.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and optimize large-scale infrastructure for TikTok AI Search & Visual Search, supporting billions of online search requests and large-volume offline data processing Evolve TikTok’s search agent platform, including multi-agent orchestration, ReAct and tool-calling workflows, RAG indexing & serving engine, and context/memory management Deploy and optimize LLM/VLM post-training and inference, including GPU inference acceleration, SFT/RL efficiency, kernel/CUDA optimizations, and offline throughput improvement Build and improve search engine components such as offline document processing pipelines, distributed indexing systems for billion/trillion documents, feature extraction services, and multi-stage retrieval/ranking services Develop scalable data pipelines and distributed systems for processing billion- or trillion-scale text, image, and video datasets, covering offline computation, stream processing, task scheduling, storage, and data quality Explore emerging technologies in personalized search, generative search, multimodal understanding, reinforcement learning, model alignment, and evaluation Collaborate with machine learning, product, and other engineering teams to deliver accurate, responsive, and engaging AI-powered and visual search experiences

Qualifications: Currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline Strong programming skills and a solid foundation in data structures and basic algorithms Familiarity with Linux development environment and proficiency in at least one programming language such as C++, Java, Python, or Go Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, with an interest in solving complex engineering problems at scale Effective communication and collaboration skills, along with a strong sense of ownership and willingness to learn Currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline Internship, research, course project, or open-source experience in one or more of the following areas: LLM/VLM serving, RAG, or AI agents Distributed systems, storage systems, and large-scale data processing Search engines, information retrieval, recommendation systems, or advertising systems Understanding of search engine concepts such as query understanding, indexing, retrieval, ranking, and result aggregation Familiarity with LLM serving frameworks such as vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM, or agent development frameworks such as LangGraph, is a plus Experience analyzing or optimizing system performance, including latency, throughput, concurrency, memory utilization, or resource efficiency Ability to learn new technologies quickly and apply them to practical engineering or research problems

Benefits: 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.