Research Scientist Intern (Data-TnS-Algo-Foundations & Intelligence Service) - 2027 Start (PhD

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@2026 Tik Tok

Algorithm

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Intern

Job Code:

A33940

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• Foundations & Intelligence Service, Trust & Safety is Tik Tok’s foundation-model team responsible for core development and research that push the boundaries of our LLM and VLM capabilities—with trustworthiness and safety built in from day one. Our work enables product teams and customers to adopt advanced AI smoothly and responsibly, with safety woven into the model stack rather than bolted on.
  
  We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship. PhD internships at Our Company provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, as well as to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.
  
  Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and professional development events, and collaboration with industry experts.
  
  Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Please clearly state your availability in your resume (Start date, End date).
• Pretraining & Continued Pretraining (CPT):
  Explore and develop approaches that improve general capability and safety for LLMs and VLMs via pretraining/CPT.
• Evaluation & Measurement:
  Build advanced evaluation systems to study emerging LLM/VLM skills and safety behaviors, aligned with real downstream use.
• Post-Training & RL:
  Develop advanced reinforcement-learning strategies (e.g., RLHF/RLAIF/DPO variants), and investigate how to balance pretraining and post-training for better capability and safety alignment.
• Scaffolded Settings & Agents:
  Probe new failure modes and pitfalls in scaffolded environments (agents, workflows, tool use), and translate insights into robust mitigations.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing an PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• Research experience in at least one of: LLMs, AI Safety, Computer Vision, Multimodality.
• Actively track recent AI-safety developments (familiar with current papers, benchmarks, and terminology).
• Proficient with at least one deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch, Tensor Flow).
• Excellent analytical/problem-solving ability, clear logical thinking, and strong communication/collaboration skills.

• Publications in top AI or Security venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, COLM, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, NDSS).

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Job Information

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

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 Tik Tok

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