About the role#
The Ads Business Integrity team builds scalable machine learning models to improve content understanding and monetization. As a Research Scientist Intern, you will work on generative AI technologies to support our advertising and e-commerce ecosystems. This role offers the opportunity to contribute to our research and product development while working alongside industry experts.
What you'll do#
- Lead research and development of generative AI technologies, including LLMs and multimodal models.
- Design and deploy solutions for content understanding and monetization across ads, short video, and live streaming.
- Drive advancements in LLM-based agents using reinforcement learning for autonomous reasoning and planning.
- Develop techniques to improve the efficiency of large-scale model training and inference, such as distillation and quantization.
- Collaborate with interdisciplinary teams to move research breakthroughs into production-grade AI services.
- Contribute to patents, publications, and open-source projects to keep our systems at the forefront of AI research.
What you'll need#
- Current Ph.D. student in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related field.
- Strong foundation in deep learning, NLP, and generative models like LLMs or diffusion models.
- Hands-on experience with large-scale model training, RLHF, and multimodal learning across text, image, and video.
- Proficiency in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
- Familiarity with distributed training frameworks.
- A track record of publications or active research review at top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, or CVPR.
- Knowledge of AI safety, alignment, and adversarial robustness.
- Experience building agentic systems using reinforcement learning.
- Engineering skills to deploy models at scale and optimize for performance.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California.
- Modality: On-site.
- Terms: Summer 2027 and Summer 2028.
- Employment: Full-time paid internship.
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.
