TikTok · 1 month ago
Research Scientist Intern (TikTok - NextGen Recommendation) - 2026 Start (PhD)
United States
Internship
Remote
Intern
$60/hr - $60/hr
Start in 2026TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video, and they are seeking a Research Scientist Intern to join their Next-Generation Recommendation team. The role focuses on designing and developing advanced recommendation systems using cutting-edge machine learning techniques to enhance user experiences and engagement.
Content CreatorsContent DiscoveryMedia and EntertainmentSocial MediaVideo
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
Qualification
Required
Currently pursuing PhD Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related field
Hands-on experience in one or more of the following areas: Large Language Models (LLM), Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, Data Mining, or Natural Language Processing
Familiarity with PyTorch or TensorFlow, solid foundation in data structures and algorithms
Excellent communication and teamwork skills, and a passion for learning new techniques and tackling challenging problems
Preferred
Strong engineering and infrastructure development skills, with hands-on experience in building and optimizing distributed systems and processing large-scale online/offline dataflow. Proficiency in CUDA programming (experience with Triton) is highly desirable
Prior research/industry experience in at least two of the following areas—multimodal content understanding, personalized recommendation, or large-scale cross-domain optimization—is a significant advantage
In-depth knowledge and expertise in large-scale Transformer architectures, including mastery of the latest optimization techniques such as Sparse Attention, Linear Attention, Flash Attention, and other cutting-edge methods to enhance model performance and efficiency
Publications at major AI-related conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, KDD, ICDM, SDM, RecSys, or simply on arXiv but with large impact
Strong track record in AI-related competitions, or participation in public/open-source AI-related projects of high visibility
Benefits
Interns have day one access to 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
TikTok
TikTok is a short-form video entertainment app and social network platform. It is a sub-organization of ByteDance.
Founded in 2003
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
TikTok 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
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (979)
2024 (601)
2023 (387)
2022 (322)
2021 (133)
2020 (72)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageLeadership Team
N Ali Mohamed
CEO
Blake Chandlee
VP Global Business Solutions
Recent News
2026-01-25
2026-01-25
2026-01-25
Company data provided by crunchbase