Research Engineer/Scientist (all levels), World Models

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 388,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/dental/vision

401(k) match

Parental leave

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Job summary

TikTok Inc. is seeking Research Engineer/Scientists for the Vision-Applied Research team to develop next-generation World Models and multimodal AI systems.

You will work on scalable data generation pipelines and long-horizon video synthesis with real-time interaction capabilities. We value strong publication records and collaboration across cross-functional teams, with opportunities to influence research directions and product impact.

Qualifications

• M.S or Ph.D. in Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Machine Learning, or equivalent experience.
• Extensive research in GenAI, multimodal foundation models, or Embodied AI.
• Proven ability to communicate complex concepts and collaborate cross-functionally.

Responsibilities

• Develop large-scale, diverse, and interactive multimodal data generation pipelines.
• Develop training pipelines for long-context interactive video generation models.
• Advance video generation models to capture long-horizon temporal consistency and realistic dynamics.

Skills

Communicating concepts

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Vision/ML/CG

Job description

Responsibilities

About the Team

The Vision-Applied Research team focuses on applied research in Generative AI and CV/Multimodal Understanding, and delivering intelligent solutions to Tiktok, enabling users to make and share creative content in a much easier way. The team has research groups dedicated to generative models for content creation, image generation, video synthesis, intelligent image/video editing, and world models.

The team is looking for Research Engineer / Scientists who can take initiatives in building next-generation World Models. The candidate will work on developing methods and infrastructure to train large-scale generative models from massive simulated and real-world multimodal datasets. This role places a particular emphasis on ensuring long-horizon temporal consistency, realistic physics, complex dynamics from the model and enabling users and agents to interact with the model in real-time.

• Develop large-scale, diverse, and interactive multi-modal data generation pipeline.
• Develop training pipeline for long-context interactive video generation models.
• Advance video generation models to capture long-horizon temporal consistency, realistic physical dynamics, object interactions, and causal relationships from large-scale multi-modal data.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• M.S or Ph.D. in Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Machine Learning, or equivalent experience.
• Extensive research experiences in broad GenAI, multimodal foundation models, or Embodied AI areas.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts and collaborate effectively within cross-functional research teams

Preferred Qualifications:

• Proven experiences in at least one of the following areas: video generation and synthesis; efficient and real-time diffusion models; 3D/physics-based simulation; or reinforcement learning for agentic environment interaction.
• Proven track record of first-author publications in prestigious venues including CVPR, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGGRAPH, and ICML

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $162000 - $387600 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate's qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

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.