Research Engineer Intern: Scalable ML for Moderation

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

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.