PhD Research Engineer Intern: AI Agent Systems

TikTok; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 68,000 - 97,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

10 paid holidays

Housing allowance

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a PhD campus intern to join the Agentic Arch team, building AI-native engineering infrastructure and researching reliable long-horizon agents that can reason over large codebases.

You will develop frontier methods, evaluate them rigorously, and bring them into production through platforms used at large scale, creating measurable improvements in engineering productivity and software quality.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing or recently completed a PhD in Computer Science or a related field.
• Experience in AI agents, LLM reasoning, or AI for code.
• Strong understanding of agent planning, reinforcement learning, or tool-using agents.
• Proficient in Python, C++, Go, or Java; ability to turn research into robust implementations.
• Excellent communication and collaboration across teams.

Responsibilities

• Develop frontier methods for AI agents and evaluate them rigorously.
• Bring research ideas into production through scalable platforms.
• Collaborate with research, infrastructure, platform, and product teams to deliver impactful results.

Skills

PhD candidate

AI agents

Agent planning

Python

C++

Communication

Education

PhD in CS or related

Tools

Go

Java

Job description

TikTok is seeking a PhD campus intern to join the Agentic Arch team, building AI-native engineering infrastructure and researching reliable long-horizon agents that can reason over large codebases.

You will develop frontier methods, evaluate them rigorously, and bring them into production through platforms used at large scale, creating measurable improvements in engineering productivity and software quality.