Research Scientist Intern (TikTok Recommendation-LLMs, RL, GenAI) - 2026 Start (PhD)

What you'll do

• Design and implement algorithms to improve recommendation performance and accuracy.
• Analyze large-scale user and content data, and deploy and evaluate recommendation systems in real-world settings.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and research teams to improve recommendation relevance, diversity, and user engagement.

What they ask for

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, or a related field, focused on recommendation systems, NLP, or multimodal learning.
• Strong theoretical foundation and hands-on research experience in relevant areas.
• Proficiency in Python and familiarity with PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Solid foundation in data structures and algorithms, plus analytical and problem-solving skills.

Nice to have

• First-author publications at top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, CVPR, or KDD.
• Experience with large-scale machine learning systems, industry applied research, real-world LLM or multimodal applications, or reinforcement learning for recommender systems.

Tools

Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, LLMs, multimodal models, reinforcement learning, bandit models, offline RL

AI focus

Research and develop generative recommendation systems; model long-term user behavior; integrate LLMs and multimodal technologies; explore post-training and reinforcement learning to align generative models with business and feed-quality goals.