Research Scientist Graduate (Monetization Technology - Business Integrity) - 2027 Start (PhD)

About the role

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.

Given the fast growth of TikTok globally, we are building a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization. We seek Research Engineers experienced in machine learning to help 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 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.

As a graduate, you will have opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Successful candidates must commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Responsibilities

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

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Individuals completing or who have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline (completed or expecting to graduate within 12 months).
• Research experience in one or more of the following areas: Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies, demonstrated through publications, thesis work, internships, or research projects.
• Solid understanding of large language model methodology, including pre-training, post-training/alignment, and evaluation, with the ability to read, reproduce, and critique recent literature.
• Ability to independently formulate a research problem, design controlled experiments, and draw sound conclusions from ambiguous results.
• 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 translating research into real-world products.

Preferred Qualifications

• Publications at top-tier venues (ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, TPAMI) or equivalent evidence of research ability.
• Experience with RLHF/post-training, reasoning, or novel model architecture design.
• Experience designing evaluation benchmarks or LLM/VLM-as-Judge methodologies.
• Experience building agentic systems, RAG pipelines, or multimodal applications.
• Track record of research that shipped into a production system.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $162,000 - $316,800 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on qualifications, skills, competencies, experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the total package, which may include additional discretionary bonuses/incentives and restricted stock units.

Benefits

• Day-one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 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).