Research Scientist Intern, Multimodal (TikTok AI Innovation Center) - 2025 Summer (PhD)

Tiktok - San Jose, CA

Full-time - Intern

San Jose, CA

Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services

About the position

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video, and our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. The TikTok Eng-AI Innovation Center is at the forefront of exploring cutting-edge AGI technologies, including large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal LLMs that encompass video, image, audio, text, and code. Our goal is to enhance content understanding on the TikTok platform, improving user experiences in searching and recommendations while effectively identifying and combating internet abuse and fraud. Additionally, we aim to optimize our codebase through advanced LLMs, making coding more accessible for our engineers. We are seeking talented individuals for a 12-week internship program starting in May/June 2025. This program is designed to provide students with industry exposure and hands-on experience, allowing them to develop fundamental skills and explore potential career paths. Interns will engage in research topics such as multi-modal LLM pretraining, instruction tuning, preference alignment, and model compression. They will have the opportunity to collaborate with researchers from top-tier universities worldwide, publish research papers, and apply for patents. Successful candidates must be able to commit to one of the specified summer internship start dates and should clearly state their availability in their resumes. The internship program includes a vibrant blend of social events and enriching development workshops, providing a strong foundation for personal and professional growth. We encourage early applications as we review them on a rolling basis.

Responsibilities

• Take part in one of our research topics, e.g., multi-modal LLM pretraining, instruction tuning, preference alignment, and model compression; propose new ideas and conduct experiments to solve selected problems.
• Engage in in-depth research and collaboration with researchers from top-tier universities worldwide.
• Publish research papers and apply for patents.

Requirements

• PhD Degree with majors in artificial intelligence, computer science, automation, and mathematics or related fields.
• Able to commit to working for 12 weeks during Summer 2025.
• Candidates with top AI conference papers in ML/CV/NLP are required.
• Solid foundation in data structure and algorithm design, proficient in one or more of Python/C++, and proficient in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Strong sense of responsibility, active and proactive, good communication and teamwork skills.
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment.
• Graduating December 2025 onwards with the intent to return to degree program after the completion of the internship.

Nice-to-haves

• Hands-on experience with LLM and multimodal LLM is preferred.
• In-depth research experience in Machine Learning, with a particular emphasis on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI.

Benefits

• Hands-on experience in developing fundamental skills.
• Opportunities to explore potential career paths.
• Access to social events and development workshops.