VLM Research Scientist – Vision, OCR & AI Safety

TikTok; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Research Scientist (Trust and Safety - Vision Language Models) in San Jose to advance LLM/VLM research and applications. You will work on pretraining, evaluation, and efficient inference within a fast-growing Foundations and Intelligence Service R&D team.

Responsibilities include enhancing VLM with OCR/captioning, exploring efficient architectures, and collaborating with diverse teams to apply models across TikTok business areas.

Qualifications

• Ph.D in Computer Science, Data Science, AI, or a related field.
• Strong understanding of cutting-edge LLM research and practical implementation.
• Proficiency in Python, Rust, or C++ and experience with deep learning frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Enhance VLM with OCR and captioning for TikTok applications.
• Explore model architecture and inference-efficient design for scaling.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams on VLM projects.
• Bridge industry insights to academic contexts.

Skills

Python

C++

Rust

PyTorch

DeepSpeed

Megatron-LM

VLLM

Education

Ph.D in Computer Science/AI or related field

Tools

PyTorch

DeepSpeed

Megatron-LM

VLLM

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Research Scientist (Trust and Safety - Vision Language Models) in San Jose to advance LLM/VLM research and applications. You will work on pretraining, evaluation, and efficient inference within a fast-growing Foundations and Intelligence Service R&D team.

Responsibilities include enhancing VLM with OCR/captioning, exploring efficient architectures, and collaborating with diverse teams to apply models across TikTok business areas.