Machine Learning Engineer - Intern (TikTok BRIC) - 2027 Start (PhD) San Jose Technology - Algorithm PhD Intern - 2027 Start

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 68,000 - 97,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

10 paid holidays per year

Housing allowance

Job summary

TikTok Inc. is seeking an intern for the Conversion-Oriented Business Risk Integrated Control (BRIC) team in San Jose.

The role focuses on applying AI to protect user trust and platform health across TikTok and related products, with hands-on ML research and real-world risk applications. The internship targets PhD students who want a full-time conversion opportunity, offering an immersive research experience, collaboration with industry experts, and exposure to cutting-edge risk-control

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science or related field.
• Solid engineering experience with LLM/Agent systems.
• Proficient in Python, SQL, and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch/TensorFlow.

Responsibilities

• Leverage AI to tackle account security risks across TikTok and overseas markets.
• Address security issues including bulk fake accounts, account trading, and account takeover.
• Build features and representations from multi-source data to improve risk detection and model stability.
• Research architecture of risk-control Agentic AI and multi-agent collaboration mechanisms.

Skills

LLM/Agent systems

Python

SQL

PyTorch/TensorFlow

Education

PhD in Computer Science

Job description

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Intern

Job Code:

A22839A

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Responsibilities

"Business Risk Integrated Control (BRIC) is a global team protecting ByteDance users, platform health, and the authenticity of community and business ecosystems. We build the risk control algorithms, AI technologies, platforms, and infrastructure behind that work, across products including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and Lark.Our work spans account and content integrity, and safety across advertising and e-commerce. We apply machine learning across areas such as graph learning, anomaly detection, and multimodal models to understand users, content, behavior, and the relationships between them. The challenge is recognizing genuine activity accurately, so the people using our products never notice the systems working.You will shape the trust, safety, and sustainable growth of ByteDance's global platforms, applying advanced AI to some of the hardest real-world problems in the field."Program Intern (Conversion-Oriented): for graduating students who are looking for full-time conversion as the primary objective.We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship. PhD internships at Our Company provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, as well as to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and professional development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

• Leverage algorithms and cutting-edge AI technologies & tools to tackle account security risks across TikTok and other overseas offline businesses, including social, live streaming, local services, e-commerce, payment and other scenarios.
• Address account security issues including but not limited to bulk fake account, account trading, malicious farming, account takeover, ticket hijacking, etc.
• Build features and representation learning based on multi-source data (account behavior, ecosystem behavior, device, graph relationships, text & image content, etc.). Improve real-time and offline risk perception and detection capabilities of models. Conduct model evaluation and online experiments, with close attention to stability, drift monitoring and model interpretability.
• Research and build the architecture of risk-control Agentic AI; develop and optimize Skills, long-chain task orchestration and multi-agent collaboration mechanisms to improve the efficiency of risk discovery and resolution.

Key internship research topics:

1. Research and build pre-trained models tailored for account security scenarios, and continuously iterate post-training via SFT, RL and related techniques.
2. Research and build long behavioral sequence models for account security, and apply them to risk identification and detection.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science or a related discipline.
• Solid engineering experience with LLM / Agent systems, proficient in mainstream agent tooling.
• Strong engineering capability, proficient in Python, SQL, and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch/ TensorFlow.

Preferred Qualifications

• Having high-quality publications at top conferences.
• Interest in high-adversarial risk control scenarios, and comfortable with technical challenges.
• Deep research experience in planning & reasoning, long task orchestration, memory & knowledge module, loop engineering, pre-training, RLHF, DPO, GRPO or related areas

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

Job Information

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:

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.

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

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