Research Engineer Intern (Monetization Technology - Business Integrity) - 2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Paid holidays

Housing allowance

Job summary

TikTok is seeking PhD interns to advance a next-generation moderation system for its platform, focusing on accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and automated remediation. You will collaborate with global teams, applying ML techniques to content understanding for monetization and user experience.

The role involves hands-on model development, data pipelines, and deployment in a fast-moving tech environment, with strong emphasis on research impact and real-world product alignment.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline (completed, or expecting to graduate within 12 months).
• Hands-on experience implementing, training, or deploying models in Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies.
• Familiarity with large language models (pre-training, fine-tuning, prompting, inference and deployment) and practical experience in at least one stage.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: clean, testable code, version control, debugging complex systems end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Build a leading moderation system for end-to-end capabilities, including rejection decisions and interpretable reasoning.
• Develop scalable ML models and partner with global teams across disciplines.
• Contribute to an ecosystem that rewards high-quality user experience and advertiser value.

Skills

Python programming

Machine learning

Software engineering

Problem solving

Collaborative mindset

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Responsibilities

Our Business Integrity team has a strong user focus and a dedication to technical excellence. We aim to meet our users' needs with reliable and high-performing platforms and services. We are looking for strong machine learning engineers who are excited to grow their business understanding, build highly scalable machine learning models, and partner across disciplines with global teams, in pursuit of excellence. Given the fast growth of TikTok in the world, we are working on building a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization. We are seeking Research Engineers who are experienced in machine learning, which can help us create an ecosystem that rewards high-quality user experience and advertiser value.

Responsibilities

Our Business Integrity team has a strong user focus and a dedication to technical excellence. We aim to meet our users' needs with reliable and high-performing platforms and services. We are looking for strong machine learning engineers who are excited to grow their business understanding, build highly scalable machine learning models, and partner across disciplines with global teams, in pursuit of excellence. Given the fast growth of TikTok in the world, we are working on building a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization. We are seeking Research Engineers who are experienced in machine learning, which can help us create an ecosystem that rewards high-quality user experience and advertiser value.

Topic Content: With the explosive growth of digital content, intelligent moderation has become a core capability for internet platforms. However, as moderation scenarios grow increasingly complex and adversarial tactics continue to evolve, traditional approaches are facing unprecedented challenges. The current landscape is characterized by multiple technical difficulties, including the dynamic nature of moderation rules, content complexity, sample scarcity, escalating adversarial behaviors, and a lack of interpretability. In particular, existing open-source large models often do not perform as effective as we expect in scenarios involving evolving moderation rules, long-form text, long temporal sequences, multi-languages, limited sample data, and adversarial content generated by AIGC.

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.

In this role, you will build a leading moderation system that enables end‑to‑end capabilities for accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and intelligent remediation, achieving fully automated moderation with performance surpassing human benchmarks.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline (completed, or expecting to graduate within 12 months).
• Hands‑on experience implementing, training, or deploying models in one or more of the following areas — Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies — through coursework, internships, or industry projects.
• Familiarity with the fundamentals of large language models (e.g. pre‑training, fine‑tuning, prompting, inference and deployment), with practical experience in at least one of these stages.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: clean, testable code, version control, and the ability to debug complex systems end to end.
• Proficient in Python and at least one deep learning framework such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.

Strong problem‑solving ability, a collaborative mindset, and a genuine interest in applying AI to real‑world products.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with large‑scale distributed training (DeepSpeed, Megatron, FSDP) or high‑throughput inference (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT‑LLM).
• Experience with production model deployment, serving optimization, or latency/cost tuning.
• Experience building data pipelines for large‑scale training or evaluation.
• Experience building agentic systems, RAG pipelines, or multimodal applications.
• Familiarity with the ads / search / recommendation industry stack.
• Open‑source contributions, strong results in ML competitions (Kaggle, Tianchi, ACM/ICPC), or granted patents.

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern

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:

• Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
• Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
• 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