PhD Intern: Recommendation AI & Foundation Models

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 68,191 - 97,120; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance from day one

Wellbeing benefits

Housing allowance eligibility for non-

Job summary

TikTok invites an Applied Scientist Intern to join the Recommendation AI Lab in San Jose for a 2026 start. You will work on foundation models for recommender and language tasks, aiming to advance monetization platforms via generative tech in search, recommendation, and advertising.

Responsibilities include scaling laws research, building a foundation model, and optimizing training/inference for real-time deployment, with a focus on long-term value and ROAS.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

Responsibilities

• Explore scaling laws for foundation models in recommendation and advertising, and build a foundation model based on unified multimodal semantic modeling.
• Build an intelligent ad placement system optimized for users' Long-Term Value (LTV) and long-term ROAS, balancing commercial value and user experience.
• Optimize the full-process training and online inference framework for foundation models, balancing computing power costs and real-time response performance.

Skills

PhD candidate

C/C++

Python

NLP/CV

LLMs

Algorithm optimization

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

LLM frameworks

Job description

TikTok invites an Applied Scientist Intern to join the Recommendation AI Lab in San Jose for a 2026 start. You will work on foundation models for recommender and language tasks, aiming to advance monetization platforms via generative tech in search, recommendation, and advertising.

Responsibilities include scaling laws research, building a foundation model, and optimizing training/inference for real-time deployment, with a focus on long-term value and ROAS.