Applied Scientist Intern - Monetization GenAI - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 50,000 - 83,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Paid holidays

Housing allowance

Job summary

TikTok is offering a PhD Internship in 2027 within the Generative AI team under Monetization Technology. The role blends hands-on research with contributions to products and future technologies for advertisers, agencies, and creators.

You will work on building an intelligent, automated ad delivery system driven by RL, multimodal analysis, and scalable video understanding to improve content replication and ROI.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD in a technical discipline (CS/CE/SE/related).
• Modeling experience in ads, search, recommender systems, NLP/CV, multimodal, or agent tech.

Responsibilities

• Build an intelligent ad delivery system optimized for long-term value (LTV) and ROAS.
• Apply reinforcement learning and multimodal analysis to improve ad content generation and delivery.

Skills

PhD candidate

LLM algorithms

Academic publications

Education

PhD in CS/CE/Software or related

Job description

Responsibilities

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2027. PhD Internships at our Company aim to provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

PhD internships at Our Company provides 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.

Team Introduction: We are the Generative AI team under Monetization Technology. Our team focuses on developing cutting‑edge Generative AI techs across all modalities, including text, image, videos, landing pages, etc., and creates industry‑leading technical solutions to improve creative efficiency for advertisers, agencies and creators. We are committed to automated creative workflows by leveraging Generative AI technologies, to increase overall revenue for advertisers, agencies and creators.

Topic Content: Short‑form videos have become a core format for ads placement. To significantly improve automation in production, this topic aims to build an intelligent agentic closed‑loop system based on TopAds. The system is designed to deeply analyze viral multimodal narratives and camera motion rhythms, and automatically orchestrate in‑house models to seamlessly integrate new products for efficient replication of successful content. It further seeks to move beyond traditional open‑loop generation by introducing real ads placement signals as key feedback. Through reinforcement learning (RL), placement data is directly fed back to continuously optimize the agent's decision‑making strategies across the full pipeline, including video understanding, controllable generation, and low‑performing content filtering and replacement.

Ultimately, the system aims to enable scalable production of high‑ROI marketing videos.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will build an intelligent ad delivery system optimized for user Long-Term Value (LTV) and long‑term ROAS, achieving an optimal balance between commercial value and user experience.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Modeling experience in one or more of the areas: Ads, Search engine, Recommender System, NLP/CV, multimodal, agent technologies.
• Have a solid foundation in algorithms related to LLMs, including but not limited to comprehensive learning and practical experience in areas such as single-modal LLM application and deployment.
• Strong publications record in top conferences (e.g., ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, N CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV).

Job Information

【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.

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.

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