Research Scientist, World Models (Intelligent Creation) - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)
Responsibilities
We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2027. As a graduate, 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 date by end of year 2027. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.
About the Team
The Intelligent Creation - Global GenAI team focuses on applied research in Generative AI, and delivers intelligent solutions to TikTok, enabling users to make and share creative content in a much easier way. The team has research groups dedicated to multimodal foundation models for content creation, image/video generation and editing, efficient modeling, and world models.
Topic Content:
As AGI large model technology advances, the way AI creates multimodal images, text, and videos is changing deeply. New creative solutions based on generative AI and agent technologies keep appearing. Multimodal creation large models use cutting-edge methods like full-modal content understanding, AIGC image and video generation, and agentic foundation models to build flexible, efficient, and industry-leading ways to create multimedia content. Through continual training and post-training, these models steadily raise their abilities in content understanding and image/video generation, optimizing the foundational models end to end for creation agent scenarios.
Challenges:
- Deeply involving in post-training (SFT/RL) of Seed multimodal models and LLM.
- Participating in unified modeling for image and video generation, driving model performance improvements, and gaining hands-on experience in model iteration and large-scale training.
- Applying agent technology and architecture, optimizing tool-calling and long-horizon task capabilities of agentic foundation models, and conducting in-depth research on agentic RL.
Research value:
This topic focuses on the multimodal creation transformation in the AGI era, relying on full-modal understanding, AIGC generation, and agentic foundation models to build an efficient and intelligent multimedia creation system. Through ongoing training and model optimization, it constantly pushes forward content generation and understanding abilities, moving AI creation from reactive generation toward autonomous intelligence. This topic combines cutting-edge technology with practical industry value, providing core support for the next generation of intelligent creation.
Want more jobs like this?
Get Unknown jobs in San Jose, CA delivered to your inbox every week.

Responsibilities
- Develop large-scale, diverse, and interactive multi-modal data generation pipeline.
- Develop training pipeline for long-context interactive video generation models.
- Advance video generation models to capture long-horizon temporal consistency, realistic physical dynamics, object interactions, and causal relationships from large-scale multi-modal data.
- Explore new products with artificial intelligence technology at its core.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- Individuals who are completing or recently completed a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Excellent collaboration and interpersonal skills
- Highly competent in algorithms and programming; Strong coding skills in Python/C++.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experiences in broad GenAI, multimodal foundation models, or Embodied AI areas.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts and collaborate effectively within cross-functional research teams
- Proven track record of first-author publications in prestigious venues including CVPR, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGGRAPH, and ICML
Job Information
[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $244800 - $588000 annually.
Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate's qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
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:
1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.
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.