Student Researcher (AI Foundation Models Infrastructure - Seed Infra) - 2026 Start (PhD

Responsibilities

About the team

The Seed Infrastructures team oversees the distributed training, reinforcement learning framework, high-performance inference, and heterogeneous hardware compilation technologies for AI foundation models.

• As an Infrastructure Intern, you may work on one or more of the following areas:
• Design and optimize large-scale distributed training systems (e.g., data/model/pipeline parallelism, memory efficiency, fault tolerance)
• Contribute to reinforcement learning training frameworks and large-scale post-training systems
• Improve inference performance, latency, and throughput for foundation models
• Develop compiler or runtime optimizations for heterogeneous hardware (GPU/accelerator)
• Work on system-level performance analysis, profiling, and bottleneck diagnosis
• Build tooling and automation to improve developer productivity and system reliability

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related technical fields
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or C++
• Solid understanding of systems, distributed computing, machine learning systems, or performance optimization
• Experience with one or more of the following:
• Distributed training frameworks (e.g., PyTorch FSDP, Megatron-style parallelism)
• Reinforcement learning training systems
• GPU programming (CUDA, Triton) or compiler technologies

• Experience working on large-scale ML systems or infrastructure projects
• Contributions to open-source ML systems or performance tooling
• Publications in ML systems, distributed systems, or related areas (a plus but not required)

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.

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; and
• 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 Dreamnia — and serves enterprise customers through Volcano Engine and Byte Plus.

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