Research Engineer Intern (Monetization Technology - Business Integrity) - 2027 Start (PhD)

Our Business Integrity team has a strong user focus and a dedication to technical excellence. We aim to meet our users' needs with reliable and high-performing platforms and services. We are looking for strong machine learning engineers who are excited to grow their business understanding, build highly scalable machine learning models, and partner across disciplines with global teams in pursuit of excellence.

About the role

Given the fast growth of TikTok globally, we are working on building a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization. We are seeking Research Engineers experienced in machine learning to help us create an ecosystem that rewards high-quality user experience and advertiser value.

With the explosive growth of digital content, intelligent moderation has become a core capability for internet platforms. However, as moderation scenarios grow increasingly complex and adversarial tactics continue to evolve, traditional approaches face unprecedented challenges. Key technical difficulties include the dynamic nature of moderation rules, content complexity, sample scarcity, escalating adversarial behaviors, and a lack of interpretability. Existing open-source large models often underperform in scenarios involving evolving moderation rules, long-form text, long temporal sequences, multi-languages, limited sample data, and adversarial content generated by AIGC.

This is a PhD internship opportunity. Internships at our company provide students with the chance to actively contribute to our products and research, shaping the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and professional development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

Responsibilities

• Build a leading moderation system that enables end-to-end capabilities for accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and intelligent remediation.
• Achieve fully automated moderation with performance surpassing human benchmarks.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline (completed or expecting to graduate within 12 months).
• Hands-on experience implementing, training, or deploying models in one or more of the following areas: Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies—through coursework, internships, or industry projects.
• Familiarity with the fundamentals of large language models (e.g., pre-training, fine-tuning, prompting, inference, and deployment), with practical experience in at least one of these stages.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: clean, testable code, version control, and the ability to debug complex systems end-to-end.
• Proficient in Python and at least one deep learning framework such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Strong problem-solving ability, a collaborative mindset, and a genuine interest in applying AI to real-world products.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale distributed training (DeepSpeed, Megatron, FSDP) or high-throughput inference (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM).
• Experience with production model deployment, serving optimization, or latency/cost tuning.
• Experience building data pipelines for large-scale training or evaluation.
• Experience building agentic systems, RAG pipelines, or multimodal applications.
• Familiarity with the ads, search, or recommendation industry stack.
• Open-source contributions, strong results in ML competitions (Kaggle, Tianchi, ACM/ICPC), or granted patents.

Pay

The hourly rate range for this internship position is $60 per hour.

Benefits

• Day-one access to health insurance, life insurance, and wellbeing benefits.
• 10 paid holidays per year.
• Paid sick time (56 hours if hired in the first half of the year, 40 if hired in the second half).
• Eligibility for housing allowance (for interns not working 100% remote).

About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, with additional offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

We strive to do great things with great people, fostering a culture of curiosity, humility, and impact. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We embrace an "Always Day 1" mindset, constantly iterating to achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users.