Student Researcher (AI Foundation Models Infrastructure - Seed Infra) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Established in 2023, the ByteDance Seed team is dedicated to pioneering new paths toward artificial general intelligence. We aspire to advance the frontier of intelligence to drive progress for both technology and society. Our research spans MLLM, GenMedia, AI for Science, and Robotics, with a global presence across China, Singapore, and the United States. The team oversees distributed training, reinforcement learning frameworks, high-performance inference, and heterogeneous hardware compilation technologies for AI foundation models.

About the role

The Seed Infrastructures team is looking for an Infrastructure Intern to contribute to large-scale AI systems. You may work on one or more of the following areas:

• Design and optimize large-scale distributed training systems (e.g., data/model/pipeline parallelism, memory efficiency, fault tolerance)
• Contribute to reinforcement learning training frameworks and large-scale post-training systems
• Improve inference performance, latency, and throughput for foundation models
• Develop compiler or runtime optimizations for heterogeneous hardware (GPU/accelerator)
• Work on system-level performance analysis, profiling, and bottleneck diagnosis
• Build tooling and automation to improve developer productivity and system reliability

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related technical fields
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or C++
• Solid understanding of systems, distributed computing, machine learning systems, or performance optimization
• Experience with one or more of the following:
  • Distributed training frameworks (e.g., PyTorch FSDP, Megatron-style parallelism)
  • Reinforcement learning training systems
  • GPU programming (CUDA, Triton) or compiler technologies

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working on large-scale ML systems or infrastructure projects
• Contributions to open-source ML systems or performance tooling
• Publications in ML systems, distributed systems, or related areas (a plus but not required)

All successful candidates must be able to establish authorization to work in the United States. The Company does not provide sponsorship or any immigration-related benefits for this position.

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 first half of year, 40 if hired in second half)
• Eligibility for housing allowance (if not working 100% remote)

Pay

The hourly rate for this position is $80.75.