What are the responsibilities and job description for the Machine Learning Engineer Intern (Training Pre-processing) - 2025 Summer (PhD) position at TikTok?
Responsibilities
Team Introduction :
The TikTok Flink Ecosystem Team plays a critical role in delivering real-time computing capabilities to power TikTok’s massive-scale recommendation, search, and advertising systems. This team is focused on building the infrastructure for stream processing at exabyte scale — enabling ultra-low-latency, high-reliability, and cost-efficient real-time data transformations.
We are deeply involved in developing and optimizing Apache Flink and surrounding components like connectors, state backends, and runtime execution models to meet TikTok’s rapidly evolving data needs at EB-level throughput and scale.
We also collaborate closely with ML infrastructure teams to bridge real-time stream processing and machine learning. This includes integrating Velox to accelerate model training, building multimodal data pipelines, and utilizing frameworks like Ray to orchestrate large-scale distributed ML workflows.
Responsibilities:
Minimum Qualifications:
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60- $60.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. 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.
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
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.
Why Join Us
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.
We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
Diversity & Inclusion
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
TikTok Accommodation
TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request
Team Introduction :
The TikTok Flink Ecosystem Team plays a critical role in delivering real-time computing capabilities to power TikTok’s massive-scale recommendation, search, and advertising systems. This team is focused on building the infrastructure for stream processing at exabyte scale — enabling ultra-low-latency, high-reliability, and cost-efficient real-time data transformations.
We are deeply involved in developing and optimizing Apache Flink and surrounding components like connectors, state backends, and runtime execution models to meet TikTok’s rapidly evolving data needs at EB-level throughput and scale.
We also collaborate closely with ML infrastructure teams to bridge real-time stream processing and machine learning. This includes integrating Velox to accelerate model training, building multimodal data pipelines, and utilizing frameworks like Ray to orchestrate large-scale distributed ML workflows.
Responsibilities:
- Design and develop core Flink operators, connectors, or runtime modules to support TikTok’s exabyte-scale real-time processing needs.
- Build and maintain low-latency, high-throughput streaming pipelines powering online learning, recommendation, and ranking systems.
- Collaborate with ML engineers to design end-to-end real-time ML pipelines, enabling efficient feature generation, training data streaming, and online inference.
- Leverage Velox for compute-optimized ML data transformation and training acceleration on multimodal datasets (e.g., video, audio, and text).
- Use Ray to coordinate distributed machine learning workflows and integrate real-time feature pipelines with ML model training/inference.
- Optimize Flink job performance, diagnose bottlenecks, and deliver scalable solutions across EB-scale streaming workloads.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Currently pursuing a PhD’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Strong programming skills in Java, Scala, or Python.
- Understanding of distributed systems, stream processing, and event-driven architecture.
- Familiar with system design concepts such as fault tolerance, backpressure, and horizontal scalability.
- Demonstrated ability to debug and analyze complex distributed jobs in production environments.
- Graduating in December 2025 or later, with the intent to return to your academic program.
- Experience with Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, or Kafka Streams.
- Hands-on experience with Ray for distributed ML or workflow orchestration.
- Familiarity with Velox, Arrow, or similar columnar execution engines for training/feature pipelines.
- Understanding of multimodal data processing (e.g., combining video, audio, and text in model training pipelines).
- Experience working with data lake ecosystems (e.g., Iceberg, Hudi, Delta Lake) and cloud-native storage at PB–EB scale.
- Contributions to open-source projects or participation in ML/engineering hackathons or competitions.
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60- $60.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. 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.
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
- Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
- Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
- Exercising sound judgment.
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.
Why Join Us
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.
We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
Diversity & Inclusion
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
TikTok Accommodation
TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request