About the role#
The Business Integrity team is building a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization. We are looking for a PhD intern to help develop a moderation system that handles complex and adversarial content. You will work on creating an ecosystem that supports both user experience and advertiser value.
What you'll do#
- Build a moderation system that enables end-to-end capabilities for accurate rejection decisions.
- Enable interpretable reasoning and intelligent remediation.
- Work toward fully automated moderation with performance that exceeds human benchmarks.
What you'll need#
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical field, with graduation expected within 12 months.
- Research experience in areas such as Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies.
- Understanding of large language model methodology, including pre-training, alignment, and evaluation.
- Ability to read, reproduce, and critique recent literature.
- Ability to independently formulate research problems, design controlled experiments, and draw conclusions from ambiguous results.
- Proficiency in Python and at least one deep learning framework like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- A collaborative mindset and interest in translating research into real-world products.
- Preferred: Publications at top-tier venues like ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, or TPAMI.
- Preferred: Experience with RLHF, post-training, reasoning, novel model architecture design, evaluation benchmarks, LLM/VLM-as-Judge methodologies, agentic systems, RAG pipelines, or production-shipped research.
Location & details#
- This is an on-site, full-time, paid internship based in San Jose, California.
- Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
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.
