Research Engineer Intern (Monetization Technology - Business Integrity) - 2027 Summer San Jose Undergraduate/Master Intern - 2027 Start

TikTok; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 51,000 - 73,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok in San Jose is offering a Research Engineer Intern (Monetization Technology - Business Integrity) for Summer 2027. You will help build a next‑generation moderation system for monetization, delivering end‑to‑end decisions with interpretable reasoning and automated remediation, collaborating with global teams on scalable ML models.

The internship targets graduate students in CS or related fields, with experience in ML (Ads/Search/Recommendation, NLP, CV), Python, PyTorch or TensorFlow, and

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline (completed, or expecting to graduate within 12 months). Exceptional Bachelor's candidates with strong research output will also be considered.
• Hands-on experience implementing, training, or deploying models in Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies through coursework, internships, or industry projects.
• Familiarity with fundamentals of large language models (pre-training, fine-tuning, prompting, inference and deployment) with practical experience in at least one stage.
• 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, collaborative mindset, and genuine interest in applying AI to real-world products.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

ML model development

LLMs familiarity

Python

PyTorch/TensorFlow

Software engineering

Problem solving

Education

Master's degree in CS

Bachelor's degree candidates

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

DeepSpeed

Megatron

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

Job description

Research Engineer Intern (Monetization Technology - Business Integrity) - 2027 Summer

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Intern

Job Code:

A137404A

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. Our internship program offers students hands‑on experience, industry exposure, and opportunities to apply their knowledge to real‑world challenges while building a strong foundation for personal and professional growth. Interns will gain practical experience, explore potential career paths, and participate in social events, learning programs, and development workshops alongside industry professionals.

Responsibilities: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 Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline (completed, or expecting to graduate within 12 months). Exceptional Bachelor's candidates with strong research output will also be considered.
• 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

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $45- $45.

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:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. 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

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