ByteDance · 3 hours ago
Student Researcher [Seed – Multimodal Interaction & World Model - RL Focused] – 2026 Start (PhD)
San Jose, CA
Internship
Onsite
Intern
$65/hr - $65/hr
Start in 2026ByteDance is a pioneering company dedicated to advancing AI foundation models. They are seeking a Student Researcher to develop reinforcement learning training systems for multimodal models and collaborate with researchers on various tasks related to world modeling and reasoning.
ContentData MiningFoundational AIInternetSocial Media
Responsibilities
Design and implement reinforcement learning (RL) training systems for large-scale multimodal foundation models
Develop unified modeling frameworks that integrate video, audio, and language, with a focus on visual latent reasoning
Explore RL-based approaches to bridge understanding and generation for multimodal visual reasoning
Collaborate with researchers to evaluate models on tasks involving world modeling, reasoning, and instruction-conditioned generation
Qualification
Required
Currently pursuing a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline
Publications in top-tier venues, such as CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, or other leading conferences in AI and ML
Strong research background in at least one of the following: reinforcement learning, multimodal learning, video understanding, or vision-language modeling
Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment
Preferred
Experience with reinforcement learning in multimodal or interactive environments
Familiarity with video generation or diffusion-based generative models
Experience with large-scale model training (e.g., distributed training, curriculum learning, or memory-augmented transformers)
Solid programming and engineering skills, with experience building training or evaluation pipelines for ML models
Benefits
Health insurance
Life insurance
Wellbeing benefits
10 paid holidays per year
Paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year)
Housing allowance
Company
ByteDance
ByteDance is a technology company that develops content creation platforms and services.
Founded in 2012
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
ByteDance has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
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Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1350)
2024 (1123)
2023 (775)
2022 (487)
2021 (417)
2020 (245)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$9.8BKey Investors
Capital TodayG42Tiger Global Management
2025-11-20Secondary Market· $300M
2024-07-25Secondary Market
2023-03-14Secondary Market· $100M
Leadership Team
Jochen Bischoff
Head of Global Business Solutions - Africa
Matty Lin
General Manager, Global Business Solutions, KR
Recent News
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