TikTok
Machine Learning Engineer Intern (Conversational AI) - 2027 Start (PhD)
Seattle, Washington · Internship · Posted Oct 28, 2026
- Education
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Operations Research, or a related technical discipline.
About the job
Develop and evaluate TikTok Shop’s production conversational AI agent, including its runtime, memory, training-data flywheel, tools, safety controls, and experimentation systems.
What you'll do
- Build agent runtime, context and memory systems, tools, and production safety controls.
- Develop post-training and self-improving workflows that turn served conversations into training, evaluation, and retrieval signals.
- Design evaluation and online experimentation systems, including judge calibration, regression testing, and causal readouts.
What they ask for
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Operations Research, or a related technical discipline.
- Strong Python plus one of C++ / Go / Rust / Java.
- Solid ML / DL / NLP fundamentals and hands-on experience with LLMs or agents.
- Basic statistical literacy and ability to turn papers or engineering blogs into working code.
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience in post-training, agent systems, evaluation and experimentation, or self-improving systems.
- Publications, strong competition results, notable open-source contributions, or e-commerce or multilingual experience.
Tools
Python, C++, Go, Rust, Java, MCP
AI focus
Build and improve a multilingual e-commerce conversational AI agent through agent-runtime engineering, memory and context systems, post-training, evaluation, and self-improving production workflows.
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