Software Engineer Intern (Recommendation Infra, Performance Efficiency) - 2027 Fall

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

TikTok is a short-form mobile video platform focused on inspiring creativity and bringing joy. The Recommendation System Infrastructure team is seeking a Software Engineer Intern to design, optimize, and improve large-scale recommendation serving infrastructure, including performance, reliability, scalability, cost efficiency, and automation workflows.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and optimize high-performance online serving systems for large-scale global recommendation systems, improving business ROI, system efficiency, and serving quality Improve the efficiency, reliability, scalability, and cross-regional consistency of recommendation system infrastructure Identify and resolve system performance bottlenecks across CPU, memory, bandwidth, GPU compute efficiency, serving latency, throughput, and resource allocation efficiency Drive cost optimization for large-scale recommendation serving, including business-impact-based cost efficiency, compute resource utilization, and infrastructure-level or strategy-level performance improvements Build reliable and efficient workflows and pipelines for automation on candidate generation, profile generation, feature processing, training data generation, and online development

Qualifications: Currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline Strong programming skills in at least one systems programming language, such as C++, C, Go, or Java Experience in building scalable backend systems, distributed systems, infrastructure systems, or high-performance online services Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networking, and distributed system fundamentals Experience with performance analysis, system debugging, reliability improvement, or large-scale service optimization Strong ownership, problem-solving ability, and communication skills Ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams, including infrastructure teams, recommendation algorithm teams, and product/business-facing engineering teams Currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline Experience with infrastructure for recommendation systems, search engines, advertising systems, machine learning systems, or large-scale online serving systems Experience optimizing high-throughput, low-latency C++ services in production environments Familiarity with profiling, benchmarking, performance tuning, capacity planning, resource efficiency improvement, and cost optimization Experience with large-scale data processing systems such as Flink, Spark, Kafka, or similar frameworks Experience building end-to-end automation systems based on AI agents, LLMs, workflow orchestration, or closed-loop engineering automation Experience designing agentic workflows for system diagnosis, performance optimization, reliability improvement, change validation, or automatic execution Experience with real-time data pipelines, online training, feature engineering, candidate generation, or recommendation system iteration workflows

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.