Research Scientist/Engineer, Neural Graphics and World Models Graduate (TikTok Engine & Tools) - 2027 Start (PhD)

- Build components of training, inference, data, or evaluation workflows using modern ML frameworks.
- Run controlled experiments, analyze model behavior, and communicate findings clearly.
- Create research prototypes for interactive graphics, creative tools, or engine-based workflows.
- Produce reproducible research artifacts, clear documentation, demonstrations, and technical reports.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:
- Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, applied mathematics, or a related discipline.
- Research experience through a laboratory, thesis, publication, internship, open-source project, or substantial independent project.
- Strong, up-to-date foundation in machine learning, generative modeling, and experimental methodology, with hands-on experience building, training, fine-tuning, or evaluating models using frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
- Familiarity with modern generative architectures and training methods such as variational autoencoders, latent tokenizers, diffusion or flow-matching models, diffusion transformers, autoregressive models, multimodal transformers, long-context modeling, pre-training, or post-training.
- Engineering fluency with model development workflows and the ability to reason about model architecture, training dynamics, data quality, and evaluation results.
- Deep experience in at least one of the following AI-for-graphics areas: 3D modeling, asset generation, or 3D representations; animation or motion generation; simulation or physics-aware learning; rendering or neural rendering; world models or video prediction; or graphics and game-engine workflows.
- Ability to understand recent research, design controlled experiments, analyze failures, and contribute to model training, data, or evaluation workflows. Interest in collaborating with Software Engineers to move research prototypes into interactive engine pipelines.

Preferred Qualifications:
- Peer-reviewed publications at leading venues such as SIGGRAPH, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, RSS, CoRL, or related research communities.
- Strong technical reports, open-source contributions, demos, project pages, or research projects that show technical depth, originality, and independent experimentation.
- Experience with 3D or world generation conditioned on text, images, video, actions, or structured scene inputs.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $128000 - $316800 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.

Client-provided location(s): San Jose, CA

Job ID: TikTok-7668831188103481605

Employment Type: OTHER

Posted: 2026-08-03T20:01:19