Location:
San Jose

Team:
Technology

Employment Type:
Intern

Job Code:
A21969A

Responsibilities

Team Introduction: The eye tracking system architecture team works on the vertical stack of eye tracking systems architecture and related key components. Our goal is enabling an eye tracking system with high population coverage, high performance, and low power consumption. Eye tracking is a highly multidiscipline area. You will have the opportunity to work on state of art technologies across refractive/diffractive optics, image sensor, human factor and CV algorithm.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2027. PhD Internships at our Company 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 Our Company provides 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).

Topic Content: The rapid advancement of AI Agents is set to have a far-reaching and transformative impact on daily life. As the hardware bridge linking AI Agents to the physical world and end users, intelligent hardware acts as a vital gateway for agents to perceive their environment and recognize user intent. Enabling AI Agents to maintain round‑the‑clock environmental awareness and efficiently capture real‑time user intentions is essential to improving their everyday service experience. This topic seeks to overcome the limitations of conventional visual perception systems. By deeply integrating sensing and computing, it explores full‑stack innovation spanning from low‑level hardware to high‑level algorithms. Key efforts include developing next‑generation sensors with real‑time understanding capabilities, investigating non‑traditional visual capture and compression techniques, and designing novel hardware architectures to run advanced algorithms—enabling highly efficient coordination across sensing, processing, and communication.

Topic Challenge: Break free from the framework of conventional sensing systems, explore novel sensors, signal processing and compression schemes to achieve highly energy-efficient sensing tasks, while enabling seamless integration with large models.

Topic Value: Breakthroughs in this research direction will enable intelligent hardware to better connect AI, users, and daily life. Against the backdrop of the AI Agent era, this will unlock the gateway to the next generation of intelligent hardware terminals and open up broader technological possibilities.

Project Objective:
PICO Lab is seeking an exceptional PhD Research Intern to contribute to next-generation low-power sensing and interaction technologies for compact wearable devices.

This role sits at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, language modeling, imaging systems, and hardware/software co-design, with a focus on developing high-performance perception systems under strict power and compute constraints.

The intern will explore novel image sensor-based sensing approaches, potentially including active illumination techniques, and help prototype efficient algorithms and system architectures that can scale to real-world deployment.

Working closely with senior engineers, the candidate will take ideas from early concept through prototype development and quantitative evaluation, helping advance future wearable interaction technologies.

Responsibilities

• Research, prototype, and evaluate novel image sensor-based sensing approaches for a wearable form factor, with an emphasis on low-power, always-on operation.
• Design and train machine learning models, utilizing computer vision and language modeling to interpret complex spatio-temporal data.
• Design and run simulations to assess performance across representative operating conditions.
• Explore hardware/software co-design opportunities, including on-sensor or near-sensor compute to meet power targets.
• Build end-to-end hardware prototypes by integrating image sensors, optics, and structured light components.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field.
• Strong research background in computer vision and machine learning, with hands-on model training experience.
• Experience with at least one of: sequence modeling, language modeling, efficient neural network design, or signal processing.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven track record of high-impact research, demonstrated by publications in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGGRAPH, or similar.
• Hands-on experience with hardware prototyping involving cameras, structured light, or other active sensing systems.
• Familiarity with on-device or on-sensor compute, embedded ML deployment, and hardware/software co-design tradeoffs.
• Self-motivated, curious, and excited about taking ambitious research ideas from prototype to working system.

Job Information

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

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $55- $55.

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.

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

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:
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:

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

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

3. Exercising sound judgment.

About Pico

Founded in April 2015, Pico is a VR company committed to developing immersive and interactive VR experiences for people around the world. Pico also provides tailor-made solutions for our enterprise clients in the fields of education and healthcare.

Why Join ByteDance

Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are 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 enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.

As ByteDancers, 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. 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.

Diversity & Inclusion

ByteDance 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 ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. 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.

Reasonable Accommodation

ByteDance 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