Algorithm

Research Scientist Intern (TikTok - NextGen Recommendation) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Location
:

San Jose

Employment Type
:

Intern

Job Code
:

A187821

Responsibilities

About the Team
You will be joining TikTok's Next-Generation Recommendation team, focused on pioneering cutting-edge recommendation systems powered by advanced large-model technologies. This team is dedicated to advancing TikTok’s personalized content discovery and user experiences by harnessing the power of large models and leveraging massive user data to build revolutionary recommendation technologies. By pushing the boundaries of deep learning and large-scale system design, we strive to achieve breakthroughs in recommendation accuracy, user engagement, and scalability to serve billions of users worldwide.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2026. PhD Internships at TikTok aim to provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

PhD internships at TikTok provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early. Please state your availability clearly in your resume (Start date, End date).

Responsibilities:

• Design and develop next-generation large-scale recommendation systems optimized for personalized, engaging, and scalable user experiences.
• Leverage state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning techniques, including large model technologies(LLM and MLLM, etc), to enhance recommendation performance and accuracy.
• Collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams, including infrastructure engineers, pmo, and researchers, to create advanced systems that improve recommendation relevance, diversity, and user engagement.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing PhD Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related field.
• Hands-on experience in one or more of the following areas: Large Language Models (LLM), Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, Data Mining, or Natural Language Processing
• Familiarity with PyTorch or TensorFlow, solid foundation in data structures and algorithms.
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills, and a passion for learning new techniques and tackling challenging problems

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strong engineering and infrastructure development skills, with hands-on experience in building and optimizing distributed systems and processing large-scale online/offline dataflow. Proficiency in CUDA programming (experience with Triton) is highly desirable.
• Prior research/industry experience in at least two of the following areas—multimodal content understanding, personalized recommendation, or large-scale cross-domain optimization—is a significant advantage.
• In-depth knowledge and expertise in large-scale Transformer architectures, including mastery of the latest optimization techniques such as Sparse Attention, Linear Attention, Flash Attention, and other cutting-edge methods to enhance model performance and efficiency.
• Publications at major AI-related conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, KDD, ICDM, SDM, RecSys, or simply on arXiv but with large impact
• Strong track record in AI-related competitions, or participation in public/open-source AI-related projects of high visibility.

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60- $60.

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Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Interns have day one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits and more. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year). Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing allowance.

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The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

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For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:
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Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

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1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

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2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

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3. Exercising sound judgment.

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About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

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Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.

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We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

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Diversity & Inclusion

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TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

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TikTok Accommodation

TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at

https://tinyurl.com/RA-request