Machine Learning Engineer Intern (E-commerce-Conversational AI) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Responsibilities

Our team is responsible for developing cutting-edge NLP/ML algorithms and strategies to improve user consumption experience, inspire merchants' service quality and revenue, and build a fair and flourishing ecosystem on our E-commerce Platform. More specifically, our team is responsible for the algorithms of Intelligent Customer Service under TikTok's global e-commerce business.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2026. Internships at ByteDance aim to offer students industry exposure and hands-on experience. Turn your ambitions into reality as your inspiration brings infinite opportunities at ByteDance

PhD internships at ByteDance provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early. Please state your availability clearly in your resume (Start date, End date).

Responsibilities:
- Applying LLMs for a variety of multilingual and multimodal scenarios of e-commerce business;
- Establishing a generative-based AI chatbot that is capable of resolving post-sale issues and achieving pre-sale interactive consultations;
- Text generation, including product titles and descriptions, dialogue summary, auto-replying of emails and tickets, etc.;
- Machine translation, including optimizing translation quality in dozens of scenarios and language pairs in the e-commerce scenarios, as well as the research of related cutting-edge technologies.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline;
- Experience with software development in at least one of the following programming languages: C++, Python, Go, Java;
- Good sense of teamwork and communication skills, practical experience in relevant business scenarios is preferred.

Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience in NLP and LLM technologies;
- Proficient in using at least one mainstream deep learning framework such as TensorFlow/PyTorch, understanding distributed training, distillation acceleration, and other implementation methods;
- Aware of certain processing methods and optimization experience on domain adaptation, small sample construction, text mining, unsupervised/semi-supervised, and other similar issues;
- Familiar with commonly used machine learning and deep learning algorithms, understand basic network model structure (DNN/LSTM/CNN, etc.) and text representation methods (LDA/Word2Vec/ELMo/GPT/BERT, etc.), have practical experience in deep learning training and reasoning model tuning;
- Experience in large-scale text data processing or cleaning (Such as using Hadoop/Spark/Hive/Flink).

By submitting an application for this role, you accept and agree to our global applicant privacy policy, which may be accessed here: https://jobs.bytedance.com/en/legal/privacy

Job Information

About Us

Founded in 2012, ByteDance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, ByteDance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.​

Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are 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 enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.​

As ByteDancers, 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. 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​

ByteDance 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 ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. 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.​

ByteDance 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​

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $72- $72. ​

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:​

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;​

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and​

3. Exercising sound judgment.​