[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 TikTok is a short-form video entertainment app and social network platform. It is a sub-organization of ByteDance. It was founded in 2003, and is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, USA, with a workforce of 10001+ employees. Its website is Company H1B Sponsorship TikTok has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 979 in 2025, 601 in 2024, 387 in 2023, 322 in 2022, 133 in 2021, 72 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.