Research Scientist Intern– E-commerce Recommendation(LLM Applications) - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)

Responsibilities

• Build industry-leading recommendation system, improving user experience, content ecosystem and platform security;
• Explore generative recommendation techniques, including Diffusion Models, prompt learning, and multimodal content generation, to unlock new capabilities in content discovery;
• Build multi-model and cross-scenario systems enabling unified recommendation across livestreams, short videos, and search;
• Deliver end-to-end machine learning solution to address critical product challenges;
• Own the full stack machine learning system and optimize algorithms and infrastructure to improve recommendation performance;
• Work with cross-functional teams to design product strategies and build solutions to grow TikTok in important markets.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline;
• Strong foundation in machine learning, with knowledge of cutting-edge AI technologies; publications in top-tier academic conferences or competition experience are preferred;
• Familiarity with big data frameworks such as Hadoop, MapReduce, and Spark;
• Experience with TensorFlow or PyTorch for model training and deployment; understanding of training acceleration techniques such as mixed precision and distributed training;
• Knowledge of model compression and inference acceleration techniques, including but not limited to quantization, pruning, distillation, and TensorRT optimization;
• Expertise in at least one of the following areas:
• Computer Vision & Multimodality: In-depth research experience in multimedia or computer vision fields, including but not limited to image search, image/video classification and recognition, image segmentation, object detection, OCR, graph neural networks, multimodal learning, unsupervised/self-supervised learning. Experience with large-scale CV/multimodal models, particularly in e-commerce scenarios, including developing and optimizing multimodal models for e-commerce videos and products. Ability to integrate LLMs with video/product representations to support tasks such as multimodal classification, video QA, cross-modal retrieval, and product categorization, with performance significantly surpassing production models. Strong hands-on experience, with achievements in competitions such as Kaggle, COCO, ImageNet, ActivityNet, or ICPC. Familiarity with state-of-the-art research, with publications in accredited conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, or ECCV.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): In-depth research experience in NLP, including but not limited to pretraining techniques, natural language understanding, multilingual and cross-lingual learning, natural language generation, transfer learning, and semi-supervised learning. Experience with large language models (LLMs), including developing NLP models to unify tasks in e-commerce scenarios and applying them in real-world business contexts. Strong practical experience, with achievements in competitions such as Kaggle, GLUE, SuperGLUE, or CLUE. Familiarity with state-of-the-art research, with publications in accredited conferences such as ACL or EMNLP.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $57- $57.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Interns have day one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits and more. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and 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.
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

• Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
• Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
• Exercising sound judgment.

About TikTok

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

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.

Diversity & Inclusion

TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

TikTok Accommodation

TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request