Multimodal Algo Researcher (AI Innovation Center) Intern - 2026 Soaring Star Talent Program

TikTok; Singapore; On-site; SGD 17,000 - 28,000; Part time

Job summary

TikTok's AI Innovation Center in Singapore invites a Multimodal Algo Researcher Intern for the 2026 Soaring Star Talent Program. Join a team exploring AGI tech, including multimodal LLMs, to improve content understanding and platform experience.

You will work on VLM foundations, data-algorithms, and cross-modal integration in a fast-paced research environment. Ideal candidates hold a PhD with top papers and strong programming in C/C++ or Python, plus a passion for ML, NLP, and Generative AI.

Qualifications

• PhD with top AI conference papers required.
• Excellent coding ability; data structures and fundamental algorithms.
• In-depth ML research with emphasis on LLMs and Generative AI.

Responsibilities

• Research and develop multimodal LLMs for TikTok applications.
• Explore adaptive frame rates and multimodal fusion.
• Collaborate with the team to publish findings and advance the project.

Skills

PhD in ML/CV/NLP

Coding: C/C++, Python

LLMs & Generative AI research

Problem solving

Education

PhD degree

Tools

C/C++

Python

Job description

Multimodal Algo Researcher (AI Innovation Center) Intern - 2026 Soaring Star Talent Program

Location:

Employment Type:

Intern

Job Code:

A128834

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Responsibilities

About The Team:

The mission of the TikTok Eng-AI Innovation Center is to explore cutting-edge AGI technologies, including but not limited to LLM, multi-modal LLM (video/image/audio/text/code), etc., to let machine better understand user creations on Tiktok platform. Regarding to video/image/audio/text, enhanced content understanding can bring better user experience of searching, recommendation, and can more accurately identify and defend internet abuse and fraud on our platform. Regarding to code, our developed LLM aims to automatically re-organize/optimize Tiktok codebase, and make the code/coding become more accessible for Tiktok engineers.

Project Introduction:

Multimodal foundation large models (VLM) represent a research hotspot in the industry and a critical technology for TikTok's business scenario applications. In 2024, TikTok's Innovation Center developed VFM V1, a multimodal large model tailored for TikTok's business scenarios. It matches the performance of the best open-source model Qwen VL on public test sets, while significantly outperforming all other foundation models on TikTok's business test sets. In the future, we aim to continuously develop foundation models with efficient perception and reasoning capabilities, capable of handling multilingual and massive video content understanding algorithms to deliver a better content consumption experience for users.

Project Challenges:

Enhance the multimodal perception encoder: The current encoder uses a fixed frame rate. We need to explore more efficient adaptive frame rates while considering the integration of modalities such as audio and user behavior. How to fuse multimodal perception and thinking capabilities to promote stronger comprehensive perception and cognitive abilities of the model.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• A PhD degree with top AI conference papers in ML/CV/NLP are required;
• Excellent coding ability, data structures, and fundamental algorithm skills, proficient in C/C++ or Python, winners of competitions such as ACM/ICPC, NOI/IOI, Top Coder, Kaggle, etc. are preferred
• In-depth research experience in Machine Learning, with a particular emphasis on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI
• Excellent ability to analyze and solve problems, and be passionate about solving challenging problems

Preferred Qualifications

• Passion for technology, good communication skills and team spirit

If you have any questions, please reach out to us at [e-mail]

Job Information

About TikTok

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.

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