[Remote] Research Scientist Intern (TikTok - NextGen Recommendation) - 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 Research Scientist Intern to join their Next-Generation Recommendation team. The role focuses on designing and developing advanced recommendation systems using cutting-edge machine learning techniques to enhance user experiences and engagement.

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

Skills

• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Interns have 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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