Generative AI Research Intern — Multimodal & LLMs

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 39,000 - 55,000; Part time

Job summary

TikTok Inc. invites PhD students to join the TikTok Search team for an internship in 2026, collaborating with top engineers and researchers on a world-class search experience across TikTok's global ecosystem.

You will work across the full stack of search—from content understanding and retrieval to ranking and user experience optimization—focusing on generative and multimodal models to address large-scale challenges.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or related field.
• Solid foundation in machine learning, deep learning, or information retrieval.
• Familiarity with LLMs, NLP, search/recommendation, or multimodal learning.

Responsibilities

• Support the development of AI search systems using large models (LLMs).
• Assist in improving ranking, personalization, and relevance in search.
• Contribute to generative and multimodal search models (video, text, image).
• Explore LLM-based approaches for complex and multi-turn queries.
• Help optimize retrieval and ranking performance at scale.
• Collaborate with mentors and cross-functional teams to prototype and evaluate solutions.

Skills

Python

Problem solving

Fast learning

Education

PhD candidate in Computer Science/ML

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

TikTok Inc. invites PhD students to join the TikTok Search team for an internship in 2026, collaborating with top engineers and researchers on a world-class search experience across TikTok's global ecosystem.

You will work across the full stack of search—from content understanding and retrieval to ranking and user experience optimization—focusing on generative and multimodal models to address large-scale challenges.