Student Researcher (Seed – Multimodal Interaction & World Model - RL Focused) – 2026 Start (PhD

Student Researcher (Seed – Multimodal Interaction & World Model - RL Focused) – 2026 Start (PhD)

Location:

San Jose

Team:
Technology

Employment Type:

Intern

Job Code: A194024

The Seed Multimodal Interaction and World Model team is dedicated to developing models that boast human-level multimodal understanding and interaction capabilities. The team also aspires to advance the exploration and development of multimodal assistant products.

Responsibilities include:

• Design and implement reinforcement learning (RL) training systems for large-scale multimodal foundation models
• Develop unified modeling frameworks that integrate video, audio, and language, with a focus on visual latent reasoning
• Explore RL-based approaches to bridge understanding and generation for multimodal visual reasoning
• Collaborate with researchers to evaluate models on tasks involving world modeling, reasoning, and instruction-conditioned generation

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline
• Publications in accredited venues, such as CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, or other leading conferences in AI and ML
• Strong research background in at least one of the following: reinforcement learning, multimodal learning, video understanding, or vision-language modeling

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with reinforcement learning in multimodal or interactive environments
• Familiarity with video generation or diffusion-based generative models
• Experience with large-scale model training (e.g., distributed training, curriculum learning, or memory-augmented transformers)
• Solid programming and engineering skills, with experience building training or evaluation pipelines for ML models

As a condition of employment, all successful candidates must be able to establish authorization to work in the United States. For this position, the Company does not provide sponsorship or any immigration-related benefits.

For Pay Transparency Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $85- $85. 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:

• Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues
• Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems
• Exercising sound judgment

Established in 2023, the Byte Dance Seed team is dedicated to pioneering new paths toward artificial general intelligence. We aspire to advance the frontier of intelligence to drive progress for both technology and society.

With a long-term vision for the AI sector, the Seed team's research spans MLLM, Gen Media, AI for Science, and Robotics. We maintain a global presence with laboratories and career opportunities across China, Singapore, and the United States. To date, we have launched industry-leading general foundation models and cutting-edge multimodal capabilities. Our technology powers over 50 application scenarios — including Doubao, Jimeng, TRAE, Dola and…