Research Scientist Intern – TikTok Recommendation(NextGen LLM) - Global Frontier Tech Recruitme[...]

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 85,000 - 121,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Housing allowance

Paid holidays

Job summary

TikTok is seeking PhD interns to contribute to genAI and content understanding research and development. You will work on foundational models and multimodal systems, collaborating with a cross-disciplinary team to push the boundaries of content recommendation and generation.

The internship offers hands-on learning, professional development events, and opportunities to engage with industry experts, with rolling applications and guidance to include start/end dates in resumes.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD in CS, ML, AI, Stats or related field.
• Experience in CV, NLP, or ML.
• Strong knowledge of a major DL framework (PyTorch, TensorFlow, MXNet, Caffe).

Responsibilities

• Contribute to research and product-facing AI projects on genAI and content understanding.
• Collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams including infra, PMO, and researchers.
• Present findings and iterate on models and experiments.

Skills

PhD candidate

Computer vision

NLP

Machine learning

Education

PhD in Computer Science / ML / AI

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

MXNet

Caffe/Caffe2

Job description

Responsibilities

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.

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.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Please clearly state your availability in your resume (Start date, End date).

About The Team

Our team's mission is to empower genAI and content understanding in TikTok businesses. Computer vision and natural language processing are important dimensions in both content generation and understanding. We are working on various foundational models, including multi‑modality pretraining, multi‑modal large language model, image generation, video generation etc. As a genAI team on the business side, we try to succeed in both achieving business metric gains (recommendation metrics), and also producing state‑of‑the‑art research outputs.

Project Overview, Challenges & Value

We aim to integrate recommendation large models multimodal large models, and the Agentic Rec framework to fundamentally reshape the underlying content distribution logic, empowering the system with deep semantic association and autonomous planning capabilities, exploring new frontiers in algorithmic design.

• Recommendation Large Models: Address challenges such as gradient convergence and representation drift in ultra-long behavioral sequences, enabling the system to achieve true ""logical reasoning"" capabilities.


• Unified Multimodal Semantic Space: Explore alignment across video, image‑text content, and user intent, constructing a fully multimodal semantic space that goes beyond text.


• Agentic Rec:Develop recommendation agents with capabilities such as self‑reflection, tool invocation, and long‑horizon planning, driving a transformation of recommendation and content distribution experiences.

Key Challenges Include

• Extreme‑scale reasoning:

Performance gains and bottlenecks associated with ultra‑large model parameters and ultra‑long sequence modeling.

• Multimodal fusion: Challenges in representation learning for cross‑modal intent alignment.


• Autonomous evolution: Breakthroughs in long‑horizon planning and decision‑making paradigms for agent systems.

Project Value

• Technical value: Explore new paradigms for recommendation, significantly improving recommendation performance and system efficiency.


• Business value: Enable deeper understanding of user interests and content, improving distribution efficiency and enhancing satisfaction for both users and creators.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop next‑generation large‑scale recommendation systems optimized for personalized, engaging, and scalable user experiences.


• Leverage state‑of‑the‑art machine learning and deep learning techniques, including large model technologies（LLM and MLLM, etc), to enhance recommendation performance and accuracy.


• Collaborate with cross‑disciplinary teams, including infrastructure engineers, pmo, and researchers, to create advanced systems that improve recommendation relevance, diversity, and user engagement.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related field.


• Experience in one of more areas of computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning


• Solid knowledge and experience with at least one major deep learning framework (e.g. PyTorch, Tensorflow, MXNet, Caffe/Caffe2).


• Familiar with deep neural network architectures such as transformer/SSM/CNN/RNN/LSTM etc.


• Strong analytical and problem solving skills. Ability to work collaboratively in cross‑functional teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Research experience demonstrated through projects, publications, or open‑source contributions.


• Authors with publications in top‑tier venues such as SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR,

Job Information

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

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $75- $75.

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