PhD AI Systems Intern - Large-Scale ML Infrastructure

Bytedance; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 34,000 - 55,000; Part time

Job summary

ByteDance is seeking a PhD internship in our Technology team in San Jose. The role focuses on advanced AI infrastructure, spanning large-scale training, RL, inference, and memory systems. You will work closely with researchers and engineers to turn ideas into working prototypes and actionable technical direction.

The internship emphasizes independent work in a fast-evolving space, with opportunities to contribute to end-to-end AI factory-like systems and publish research findings.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in a technical field related to AI systems.
• Strong background in ML systems, distributed systems, or large-scale AI workloads.
• Ability to reason about model behavior, runtime performance and system trade-offs.
• Ability to work independently in ambiguous, fast-evolving spaces with limited guidance.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for collaboration with researchers and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Conduct research and build prototypes for next-gen AI systems across training, RL, inference, and agent workloads.
• Study bottlenecks and trade-offs across the stack: communication, scheduling, storage, observability, and memory.
• Develop benchmarking methods that capture performance, efficiency, scalability, and cost under AI workloads.
• Explore designs in distributed training, RL systems, inference optimization, and accelerator-aware serving.
• Collaborate with researchers to turn ideas into prototype systems and technical proposals.
• Communicate results through technical writing and experiments.

Skills

ML systems

Distributed systems

Large-scale training

Inference systems

Reinforcement learning systems

Storage systems

Networking

Infrastructure engineering

Education

PhD in Computer Science / Computer Engineering / Electrical Engineering / Mathematics / Statistics or related field

Job description

ByteDance is seeking a PhD internship in our Technology team in San Jose. The role focuses on advanced AI infrastructure, spanning large-scale training, RL, inference, and memory systems. You will work closely with researchers and engineers to turn ideas into working prototypes and actionable technical direction.

The internship emphasizes independent work in a fast-evolving space, with opportunities to contribute to end-to-end AI factory-like systems and publish research findings.