Research Scientist Intern (TikTok - NextGen Recommendation) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Responsibilities

Design and develop next-generation large-scale recommendation systems optimized for personalized, engaging, and scalable user experiences.

Leverage state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning techniques, including large model technologies (LLM and MLLM, etc), to enhance recommendation performance and accuracy.

Collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams, including infrastructure engineers, PMO, and researchers, to create advanced systems that improve recommendation relevance, diversity, and user engagement.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing PhD Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related field.
• Hands-on experience in one or more of the following areas: Large Language Models (LLM), Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, Data Mining, or Natural Language Processing
• Solid foundation in data structures and algorithms.
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills, and a passion for learning new techniques and tackling challenging problems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong engineering and infrastructure development skills, with hands-on experience in building and optimizing distributed systems and processing large-scale online/offline dataflow.
• Proficiency in CUDA programming (experience with Triton) is highly desirable.
• Prior research/industry experience in at least two of the following areas—multimodal content understanding, personalized recommendation, or large-scale cross-domain optimization—is a significant advantage.
• In-depth knowledge and expertise in large-scale Transformer architectures, including mastery of the latest optimization techniques such as Sparse Attention, Linear Attention, Flash Attention, and other cutting-edge methods to enhance model performance and efficiency.
• Publishations at major AI-related conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, KDD, ICDM, SDM, RecSys, or simply on arXiv but with large impact.
• Strong track record in AI-related competitions, or participation in public/open-source AI-related projects of high visibility.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60- $60.
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.

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.