{"id":1256542,"url":"https://alion.io/job/tiktok-software-engineer-project-intern-global-e-commerce-search-infrastructure-2026-start","title":"Software Engineer Project Intern (Global E-Commerce Search Infrastructure) - 2026 Start","company":{"id":47,"name":"TikTok","domain":"tiktok.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/tiktok","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Feishu","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":3417,"ghost_share":0.201,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":95,"computed_at":"2026-10-21T05:46:15Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"intern","employment_type":"internship","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Seattle, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Flink","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":true},{"name":"FAISS","optional":true},{"name":"Redis","optional":true},{"name":"RocksDB","optional":true},{"name":"Vespa","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-15T03:44:15Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-25","last_verified_at":"2026-10-21T14:28:28Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":98,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":98},"description":"岗位职责 / Responsibilities\nAbout the Team:\nSearch is no longer just a feature-it is the defining battleground that will determine whether TikTok Shop becomes the first truly global e-commerce super-app. Our Search platform is the core engine behind the \"shelf-field\" (product card) strategy, and the key to competing head-to-head with Amazon, Taobao, and Pinduoduo in a global market worth over $10 trillion.\nSearch will propel TikTok Shop from tens of billions to hundreds of billions in annual GMV by activating real shopping intent, unlocking zero-sales products, and ensuring every item becomes instantly discoverable the moment a user types or taps.\nWe innovate where extreme performance, massive global scale, and uncompromising consistency meet.\nAs a Project Intern, you will contribute to impactful short-term projects and gain hands-on experience in a fast-paced, professional environment. This internship offers the opportunity to develop practical skills, apply your knowledge to real-world challenges, and explore your career interests.\nApplications are reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early.\nResponsibilities:\nDuring this internship, you will join the E-Commerce Engineering team to tackle challenges in distributed systems and information retrieval. You will:\n- Core Architecture: Design and develop high-performance, low-latency, and high-availability online search services. Optimize core components including the inverted index, vector retrieval (ANN/HNSW), and query understanding.\n- Data Pipelines: Build highly scalable and fault-tolerant data pipelines using Flink, Kafka, and Spark to ensure product changes (price, stock, and new listings) are reflected in search results in near real-time.\n- System Optimization: Drive latency and throughput optimizations for services handling hundreds of thousands of QPS. Troubleshoot complex distributed system issues to ensure 99.99% availability.\n- Innovation: Participate in the research and implementation of next-generation search infrastructure, focusing on storage decoupling, cloud-native architecture, AI Search, and multi-modal fusion.\n- Collaboration: Work with your mentor and ML engineers to productionize state-of-the-art models and build globalized large-scale recommendation systems.\n任职要求 / Requirements\nMinimum Qualifications:\n- Currently pursuing a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Development, or a related technical discipline.\n- Must be able to commit to a 12-week full-time work period during Fall 2026.\n- Solid programming proficiency in at least one general-purpose language: C++, Go, Java, or Python (C++/Go is heavily preferred for Infra roles).\n- Strong foundation in computer science, specifically data structures, algorithms, and system design.\nPreferred Qualifications:\n- Distributed Systems: Experience with search engines (e.g., Lucene, Elasticsearch, Vespa), distributed storage (RocksDB, Redis), or big data frameworks (Flink, Spark, Kafka).\n- Problem Solving: Demonstrated software engineering experience from previous internships, open-source contributions, or competitive programming (e.g., ACM-ICPC).\n- Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with information retrieval concepts (BM25, learning-to-rank) or vector similarity search (FAISS, HNSW).","description_format":"text","description_chars":3307,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Commerce","Advertising","Social Commerce","Streaming & OTT 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