Multimodal Algo Researcher Intern (AI Innovation Center) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Responsibilities

About The Team:
The mission of the TikTok Eng-AI Innovation Center is to explore cutting-edge AGI technologies, including but not limited to LLM, multi-modal LLM (video/image/audio/text/code), etc., to let machine better understand user creations on Tiktok platform. Regarding to video/image/audio/text, enhanced content understanding can bring better user experience of searching, recommendation, and can more accurately identify and defend internet abuse and fraud on our platform. Regarding to code, our developed LLM aims to automatically re-organize/optimize Tiktok codebase, and make the code/coding become more accessible for Tiktok engineers.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2026. PhD Internships at TikTok aim to provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

PhD internships at TikTok provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early. Please state your availability clearly in your resume (Start date, End date).

The main job directions include:
- Drive core technology development for large language model code direction, continuously optimizing code comprehension, reasoning, and generation capabilities.
- Focus on improving code comprehension, reasoning, and generation capabilities in real-world production codebases, improving TikTok service code performance and privacy compliance.
- Explore Code Agent capabilities suitable for actual business production environments, and improve TikTok R&D efficiency.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications
1. PHD with top AI conference papers in ML/CV/NLP are required;
2. Excellent coding ability, data structures, and fundamental algorithm skills, proficient in C/C++ or Python, winners of competitions such as ACM/ICPC, NOI/IOI, Top Coder, Kaggle, etc. are preferred
3. In-depth research experience in Machine Learning, with a particular emphasis on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI
4. Excellent ability to analyze and solve problems, and be passionate about solving challenging problems

Preferred Qualification:
1. Passion for technology, good communication skills and team spirit

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

If you have any questions, please reach out to us at apac-earlycareers@tiktok.com.