Software Engineer - Intern (TikTok BRIC) - 2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 68,000 - 97,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Wellbeing benefits

10 paid holidays

Job summary

TikTok seeks a Campus Intern in the BRIC group to help shape trust, safety, and growth across global platforms using AI techniques. You will work on performance profiling, agent-driven rule governance, and platform foundations within a cross-functional team based in the Los Angeles area.

Ideal candidates are pursuing a PhD, with strong coding skills in Python/Go/C++/Java, ML/data analysis expertise, and excellent English communication. Internship offers hands-on impact and mentorship.

Qualifications

• Pursuing PhD in a technical field as listed.
• Strong programming skills in Python/Go/C++/Java with solid software engineering.
• Strong ML and data analysis foundation with rigorous experimental methods.
• Excellent communication in English in a cross-functional setting.

Responsibilities

• Profile the risk engine performance and optimize latency, CPU, memory and cost.
• Design agents to audit rule base and manage changes with safety/traceability.
• Contribute to agent platform, evaluation benchmarks, observability and guardrails.

Skills

Python

Go

C++

Java

ML/Data analysis

Education

PhD in CS/AI/ML/SE/DS

Tools

LLM agents

Rule engines

Observability tooling

Job description

Responsibilities

"Business Risk Integrated Control (BRIC) is a global team protecting ByteDance users, platform health, and the authenticity of community and business ecosystems. We build the risk control algorithms, AI technologies, platforms, and infrastructure behind that work, across products including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and Lark.

"Business Risk Integrated Control (BRIC) is a global team protecting ByteDance users, platform health, and the authenticity of community and business ecosystems. We build the risk control algorithms, AI technologies, platforms, and infrastructure behind that work, across products including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and Lark. Our work spans account and content integrity, and safety across advertising and e-commerce. We apply machine learning across areas such as graph learning, anomaly detection, and multimodal models to understand users, content, behavior, and the relationships between them. The challenge is recognizing genuine activity accurately, so the people using our products never notice the systems working. You will shape the trust, safety, and sustainable growth of ByteDance's global platforms, applying advanced AI to some of the hardest real-world problems in the field.

Responsibilities

• Engine performance, continuously improved by Agents: Build agent workflows that profile the risk engine, identify performance bottlenecks (latency, CPU, memory, cost), propose and verify optimizations, and detect performance regressions. Explore RSI (Recursive Self-Improvement) loops — propose, benchmark, evaluate, iterate — so optimization becomes a sustained, closed-loop process rather than one-off tuning.
• Proactive rule governance by Agents: Design agents that actively audit the rule base across its lifecycle — detecting redundant, conflicting, expired, or low-value rules, analyzing online impact, and generating safe change or decommission proposals with human-in-the-loop approval, rollback, and audit trails.
• Agent platform and evaluation foundations: Contribute to the shared capabilities these agents depend on: tool use and workflow orchestration, evaluation benchmarks and guardrails, observability, and safety controls — and take prototypes to production landing with measurable impact.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, Data Science or a related technical discipline.
• Solid programming skills, proficient in one of the languages (Python / Go / C++ / Java), with good software engineering practices.
• Strong foundation in machine learning and data analysis; rigorous experimental methodology — defining metrics, running controlled comparisons, and drawing defensible conclusions.
• Strong sense of ownership, proactive, and effective in communication; able to work in an English-speaking, cross-functional environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Research or engineering experience in LLM agents, self-improving / self-evolving systems (RSI), automated code or performance optimization, program synthesis, or reinforcement learning; Publications at top venues are a plus.
• Experience with large-scale backend or infrastructure systems — performance profiling and optimization, distributed systems, rule engines, feature / factor platforms, or risk control systems.
• Experience building agent evaluation, observability, or safety / guardrail mechanisms for production LLM systems.
• Open-source contributions, competition results, or prior research internships in related areas.
• Hands-on experience of building with LLMs/Agents is a big plus — e.g., tool and function calling, RAG, multi-step agent workflows, prompt and context engineering — through research, projects, or prior internships.

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.

By submitting an application for this role, you accept and agree to our global applicant privacy policy, which may be accessed here: https://careers.tiktok.com/legal/privacy

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

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60- $60.

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.

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