Research Scientist, Intelligent Editing and AI Agent (Multimodality) Graduate (Intelligent Creation) -Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program -2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 254,000 - 588,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) with company match

Parental leave

Disability coverage

Job summary

TikTok Inc. in Silicon Valley invites graduates to join the Intelligent Creation - Global GenAI team in 2027. You will tackle bold ideas, work on multimodal foundation models for content creation, image/video generation and editing, and contribute to efficient modeling and world models.

Successful candidates should be able to onboard by year-end 2027 and include availability and graduation date in resume. This role emphasizes cutting-edge research in computer vision and AI with opportunities to

Qualifications

• PhD in a related technical discipline completed or near completion.
• Strong collaboration and interpersonal skills.
• Proficient in algorithms and programming.
• Strong coding skills in Python and C++.

Responsibilities

• Conduct cutting-edge research and development in computer vision and machine learning, especially in the areas of multi-modal understanding, vision and language, large-scale training, etc.
• Explore new products with artificial intelligence technology at its core.

Skills

Collaboration

Algorithms

Programming

Python

C++

Education

PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical discipline

Job description

Responsibilities

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2027. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at our Company.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by end of year 2027. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

About the Team

The Intelligent Creation - Global GenAI team focuses on applied research in Generative AI, and delivers intelligent solutions to TikTok, enabling users to make and share creative content in a much easier way. The team has research groups dedicated to multimodal foundation models for content creation, image/video generation and editing, efficient modeling, and world models.

Topic Content

As AGI large model technology advances, the way AI creates multimodal images, text, and videos is changing deeply. New creative solutions based on generative AI and agent technologies keep appearing. Multimodal creation large models use cutting-edge methods like full-modal content understanding, AIGC image and video generation, and agentic foundation models to build flexible, efficient, and industry-leading ways to create multimedia content. Through continual training and post-training, these models steadily raise their abilities in content understanding and image/video generation, optimizing the foundational models end to end for creation agent scenarios.

Challenges

• Deeply involved in continous training and post-training (SFT/RL) of Seed multimodal models and LLM.
• Participating in unified modeling for image and video generation, driving model performance improvements, and gaining hands-on experience in model iteration and large-scale training.
• Applying agent technology and architecture, optimizing tool-calling and long-horizon task capabilities of agentic foundation models, and conducting in-depth research on agentic RL.

Research value

This topic focuses on the multimodal creation transformation in the AGI era, relying on full-modal understanding, AIGC generation, and agentic foundation models to build an efficient and intelligent multimedia creation system. Through ongoing training and model optimization, it constantly pushes forward content generation and understanding abilities, moving AI creation from reactive generation toward autonomous intelligence. This topic combines cutting-edge technology with practical industry value, providing core support for the next generation of intelligent creation.

Responsibilities

• Conduct cutting-edge research and development in computer vision and machine learning, especially in the areas of multi-modal understanding, vision and language, large-scale training, etc.
• Explore new products with artificial intelligence technology at its core.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Individuals who are completing or recently completed a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Excellent collaboration and interpersonal skills
• Highly competent in algorithms and programming;
• Strong coding skills in Python/C++.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in multimodal understanding, such as video highlight detection and slicing, audio/music understanding, etc.
• Experience in vision and language, such as image/video captioning, retrieval, VQA, and other related fields.
• Experience with language models and apply them in various downstream tasks, especially for intelligent editing.
• Experience in large-scale training and RLHF.
• Preferring candidates with publications in venues such as CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia, etc

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $254400 - $588000 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.