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TikTok · 1 hour ago

Research Scientist Intern (TikTok Recommendation-LLMs, RL, GenAI) - 2026 Start (PhD)

San Jose, CA

Internship

Onsite

Intern

$60/hr - $60/hr

Start in 2026

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video, and they are seeking a PhD student to join their US Core Recommendation Team. The role involves developing next-generation recommendation systems to enhance user experience through innovative algorithms and research in areas like generative models and multimodal technologies.

Content CreatorsContent DiscoveryMedia and EntertainmentSocial MediaVideo

H1B Sponsor Likely

Responsibilities

Conduct in-depth research and development in the aforementioned groundbreaking directions, designing and implementing innovative algorithms to enhance recommendation performance and accuracy

Analyze large-scale user behavior data and content data to gain insights and drive model improvements

Participate in the deployment and evaluation of the developed recommendation systems in real-world scenarios, ensuring their practical effectiveness

Collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams, including infrastructure engineers, PMO, and researchers, to create advanced systems that improve recommendation relevance, diversity, and user engagement

Qualification

Recommendation systemsNatural language processingMultimodal learningPythonPyTorchTensorFlowReinforcement learningAnalytical skillsData structuresAlgorithmsProblem solving

Required

Currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, or a related field, with a focus on recommendation systems, natural language processing, or multimodal learning

Strong theoretical foundation and hands-on research experience in relevant areas

Proficiency in Python and familiarity with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow

Solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, and analytical and problem solving skills

Preferred

First-author publications in top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, CVPR, or KDD

Experience with large-scale machine learning systems or applied research in industry

Prior work or research integrating LLMs or multimodal models into real-world applications

Familiarity with reinforcement learning, bandit algorithms, or offline RL for recommender systems

Benefits

Interns have day one access to health insurance

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits and more

Interns also receive 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)

Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing allowance.

Company

TikTok

Glassdoor3.4

TikTok is a short-form video entertainment app and social network platform. It is a sub-organization of ByteDance.

Founded in 2003

Los Angeles, California, USA

10001+ employees

https://www.tiktok.com

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)