About the role#
The Multimedia AI team focuses on researching and applying Large Language Models to power global products. This internship offers hands-on experience, industry exposure, and the chance to apply academic knowledge to real-world challenges. You will work alongside professionals to build a foundation for your career.
What you'll do#
- Support the development and optimization of post-training strategies, including instruction tuning, preference tuning, and model alignment.
- Build evaluation pipelines to measure model performance, helpfulness, and safety across diverse multimedia use cases.
- Research and implement methodologies in reward modeling and human preference learning.
- Collaborate with engineering teams to move experimental research into production-ready applications like video understanding, translation, and content classification.
- Analyze and process large-scale datasets to identify patterns that improve model behavior and alignment quality.
What you'll need#
- Current enrollment in an Undergraduate or Master’s degree program in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical discipline.
- Strong programming skills in Python.
- Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
- A foundational understanding of Transformer architectures and LLM training principles.
- Ability to learn quickly and a strong interest in AI product application.
- Previous experience or research projects involving LLM fine-tuning, RLHF, or synthetic data generation.
- Familiarity with distributed training tools like DeepSpeed or Megatron-LM.
- Experience or interest in multimodal AI, such as integrating text with video or audio.
- A track record of building and deploying AI projects through internships, open-source contributions, or academic research.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California, United States
- Term: Summer 2027
- Work Modality: On-site
- Position Type: Full-time intern
- Compensation: $45 per hour
About TikTok
TikTok operates as an entertainment provider. The company maintains a global presence with offices in cities including Los Angeles, Singapore, New York, London, and Tokyo. It employs over 92,000 people. The organization is privately held.
How to get in at TikTok
Landing an internship at TikTok requires speed because early applicants often get seen before the pile grows. Intern Insider sends an instant alert the moment a role matching your target is published anywhere, so you can apply among the first. This gives you a better chance of your resume being reviewed while the team is still actively filling the position. You should aim to be one of the first people to submit your materials. Reaching out to the right person can also improve your chances of getting a response. Intern Insider surfaces the recruiters behind the company roles so you can contact them directly to ask about the role or a referral. This direct approach often works better than waiting for a response from a general application queue.
