Research Scientist, Vision-Language Models (VLM)

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

Job summary

TikTok Inc. Foundations and Intelligence Service R&D is seeking researchers in LLM, VLM and Omni Models to advance pretraining, RL alignment, and efficient inference for real-world TikTok applications.

Join a fast-growing team tackling multi-modality models with cross-disciplinary collaboration, aiming to bridge industry problems with academic insights and publish impactful results in AI research and scalable production systems.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Science, AI or related field.
• Strong understanding of cutting-edge LLM research and practical implementation.
• Proficiency in Python, Rust or C++, and DL frameworks (PyTorch, DeepSpeed, Megatron, vLLM).

Responsibilities

• Enhance VLM with OCR and captioning for TikTok applications.
• Explore architecture and inference-efficient design for scalable downstream use.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to apply VLMs across domains.
• Bridge industry insights to academic research.

Skills

PhD in Computer Science / Data Science

LLM research

Python / Rust / C++ programming

Education

Ph.D in Computer Science / Data Science / AI

Tools

PyTorch

DeepSpeed

Megatron-LM

vLLM

Job description

TikTok Inc. Foundations and Intelligence Service R&D is seeking researchers in LLM, VLM and Omni Models to advance pretraining, RL alignment, and efficient inference for real-world TikTok applications.

Join a fast-growing team tackling multi-modality models with cross-disciplinary collaboration, aiming to bridge industry problems with academic insights and publish impactful results in AI research and scalable production systems.