Research Scientist Intern - TikTok Recommendation(NextGen LLM) - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)
Responsibilities
We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2027. As an intern, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at our Company.
Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding during the summer 2027. Please state your availability clearly in your resume.
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.
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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.
1. 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.
2. Unified Multimodal Semantic Space: Explore alignment across video, image-text content, and user intent, constructing a fully multimodal semantic space that goes beyond text.
3. 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:
1. Extreme-scale reasoning:
Performance gains and bottlenecks associated with ultra-large model parameters and ultra-long sequence modeling.
2. Multimodal fusion: Challenges in representation learning for cross-modal intent alignment.
3. Autonomous evolution: Breakthroughs in long-horizon planning and decision-making paradigms for agent systems.
Project Value:
1. Technical value: Explore new paradigms for recommendation, significantly improving recommendation performance and system efficiency.
2. 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:
1. Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related field.
2. Experience in one of more areas of computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning
3. Solid knowledge and experience with at least one major deep learning framework (e.g. PyTorch, Tensorflow, MXNet, Caffe/Caffe2).
4. 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,
Perks and Benefits
Health and Wellness
- Health Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- HSA
- Life Insurance
- Fitness Subsidies
- Short-Term Disability
- Long-Term Disability
- On-Site Gym
- Mental Health Benefits
- Virtual Fitness Classes
Parental Benefits
- Fertility Benefits
- Adoption Assistance Program
- Family Support Resources
Work Flexibility
- Flexible Work Hours
- Hybrid Work Opportunities
Office Life and Perks
- Casual Dress
- Snacks
- Pet-friendly Office
- Happy Hours
- Some Meals Provided
- Company Outings
- On-Site Cafeteria
- Holiday Events
Vacation and Time Off
- Paid Vacation
- Paid Holidays
- Personal/Sick Days
- Leave of Absence
Financial and Retirement
- 401(K) With Company Matching
- Performance Bonus
- Company Equity
Professional Development
- Promote From Within
- Access to Online Courses
- Leadership Training Program
- Associate or Rotational Training Program
- Mentor Program
Diversity and Inclusion
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Program
- Employee Resource Groups (ERG)
Company Videos
Hear directly from employees about what it is like to work at TikTok.