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TikTok · 4 days ago

(General Hire) Research Scientist Graduate (TikTok Recommendation-Next Gen Recommendation) - 2026 Start (PhD)

San Jose, CA

Full-time

Onsite

New Grad, Entry Level

$137K/yr - $360K/yr

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video, and they are seeking a Research Scientist Graduate to join their team in 2026. The successful candidate will research and develop next-generation recommendation models, design large-scale systems for content understanding, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to create scalable solutions.

Content CreatorsContent DiscoveryMedia and EntertainmentSocial MediaVideo

H1B Sponsor Likely

Responsibilities

Research and develop next-generation recommendation models leveraging LLMs, MLLMs, and generative techniques

Design and optimize large-scale systems for multimodal content understanding and personalized ranking

Collaborate with cross-functional teams (infra, PMs, research) to turn prototypes into scalable solutions

Stay at the forefront of academic advancements and apply SOTA ideas to solve large-scale, real-world recommendation challenges

Qualification

Recommendation systemsLLMsMLLMsMultimodal learningPythonTransformer architecturesLarge model optimizationResearch publicationsIndustry-scale ML systemsCollaborative workAdaptability

Required

Final-year Ph.D. candidate or recent Ph.D. graduate in Computer Science or a related field

Research or applied experience in recommendation systems, LLMs, MLLMs, or multimodal learning

Strong programming skills (Python preferred), with a solid grasp of data structures and system-level thinking

Familiarity with Transformer architectures and large model optimization techniques (e.g., Sparse/Flash/Linear Attention)

Ability to work collaboratively across teams and adapt research into practical production solutions

Preferred

Publications in top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, RecSys, KDD, WWW, or WSDM

Prior internship or project experience in industry-scale ML systems

Benefits

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

10 paid holidays per year

10 paid sick days per year

17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure)

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)