[Remote] Research Scientist Intern (TikTok Recommendation-LLMs, RL, GenAI) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video, and they are seeking a PhD student to join their US Core Recommendation Team. The role focuses on developing innovative recommendation systems that enhance user experiences through cutting-edge technologies and algorithms.

Responsibilities

• Conduct in-depth research and development in the aforementioned groundbreaking directions, designing and implementing innovative algorithms to enhance recommendation performance and accuracy
• Analyze large-scale user behavior data and content data to gain insights and drive model improvements
• Participate in the deployment and evaluation of the developed recommendation systems in real-world scenarios, ensuring their practical effectiveness
• Collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams, including infrastructure engineers, PMO, and researchers, to create advanced systems that improve recommendation relevance, diversity, and user engagement

Skills

• Currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, or a related field, with a focus on recommendation systems, natural language processing, or multimodal learning
• Strong theoretical foundation and hands-on research experience in relevant areas
• Proficiency in Python and familiarity with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, and analytical and problem solving skills
• First-author publications in top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, CVPR, or KDD
• Experience with large-scale machine learning systems or applied research in industry
• Prior work or research integrating LLMs or multimodal models into real-world applications
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning, bandit algorithms, or offline RL for recommender systems

Benefits

• Day one access to health insurance
• Life insurance
• 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 of year)
• Housing allowance

Company Overview

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