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

About the role

We are looking for Research Engineers who are experienced in machine learning to help build a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization. This role focuses on creating an ecosystem that rewards high-quality user experience and advertiser value, addressing challenges in intelligent moderation such as evolving rules, content complexity, sample scarcity, adversarial behaviors, and interpretability.

This internship provides PhD students the opportunity to contribute to TikTok’s products and research while collaborating with global teams and industry experts. The experience blends hands-on learning, professional development, and community-building.

Responsibilities

• Build a leading moderation system with end-to-end capabilities for accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and intelligent remediation.
• Achieve fully automated moderation with performance surpassing human benchmarks.
• Collaborate across disciplines with global teams to advance machine learning models and platforms.
• Address technical challenges in moderation, including dynamic rules, long-form text, multi-language support, limited sample data, and adversarial content generated by AIGC.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• 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).
• 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 hourly rate for this internship position is $60.

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 hours 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, with a mission to inspire creativity and bring joy. Our global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, with additional offices in major cities worldwide. We strive to foster an inclusive environment that values diverse voices and perspectives, reflecting the global communities we serve.