PhD Research Scientist Intern: Scalable ML for Moderation

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 55,000 - 96,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok Inc. is seeking PhD interns in 2027 to contribute to next-generation moderation and content understanding systems. The role emphasizes scalable ML models, interpretable reasoning, and cross‑disciplinary collaboration with global teams to enhance user experience and advertiser value.

The internship blends hands-on learning with development events, and opportunities to work on challenging moderation scenarios with evolving rules and multilingual content.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in a technical discipline.
• Modeling experience in ads, search, recommender systems, NLP/CV, multimodal or agent technologies.
• Solid foundation in LLM-related algorithms and deployment.
• Strong publications in top conferences (ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR/ICCV/ECCV).

Responsibilities

• Build a leading moderation system enabling end‑to‑end, automated decisions.
• Provide interpretable reasoning and intelligent remediation capabilities.
• Collaborate with global teams to advance content understanding for monetization.

Skills

Ads modeling

Search modeling

Recommender systems

NLP/CV

Multimodal

Agent technologies

Education

PhD in Software Development, CS, CE, or related

Job description

TikTok Inc. is seeking PhD interns in 2027 to contribute to next-generation moderation and content understanding systems. The role emphasizes scalable ML models, interpretable reasoning, and cross‑disciplinary collaboration with global teams to enhance user experience and advertiser value.

The internship blends hands-on learning with development events, and opportunities to work on challenging moderation scenarios with evolving rules and multilingual content.