Student Researcher in Foundation Models (Reasoning, Planning & Agent) - 2025 Start (PhD)

Responsibilities

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and its offices include New York, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us
Creation is the core of TikTok's purpose. Our platform is built to help imaginations thrive. This is doubly true of the teams that make TikTok possible.
Together, we inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we all believe in and aim towards achieving every day.
To us, every challenge, no matter how difficult, is an opportunity; to learn, to innovate, and to grow as one team. Status quo? Never. Courage? Always.
At TikTok, we create together and grow together. That's how we drive impact - for ourselves, our company, and the communities we serve.
Join us.

Team Introduction
This position is responsible for researching and building the company's LLMs. The role involves exploring new applications and solutions for related technologies in areas such as search, recommendation, advertising, content creation, and customer service. The goal is to meet the increasing demand for intelligent interactions from users and to significantly enhance their lifestyle and communication in the future.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for a Student Researcher opportunity in 2025. Student Researcher opportunities aim to offer students industry exposure and hands-on experience. Turn your ambitions into reality as your inspiration brings infinite opportunities.

The Student Researcher position provides unique opportunities that go beyond the constraints of our standard internship program, allowing for flexibility in duration, time commitment, and location of work.

Candidates can apply to a maximum of two positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you apply. The application limit is applicable to TikTok and its affiliates' jobs globally. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early.

Responsibilities:
- Reasoning and planning for foundation models. Enhance reasoning and planning throughout the entire development process, encompassing data acquisition, model evaluation,pretraining, SFT, reward modeling, and reinforcement learning, to bolster overall performance.
- Synthesize large-scale, high-quality (multi-modal) data through methods such as rewriting, augmentation, and generation to improve the abilities of foundation models in various stages (pretraining, SFT, RLHF).
- Solve complex tasks via system 2 thinking, leverage advanced decoding strategies such as MCTS, A*.
- Investigate and implement robust evaluation methodologies to assess model performance at various stages, unravel the underlying mechanisms and sources of their abilities, and utilize this understanding to drive model improvements.
- Teach foundation models to use tools, interact with APIs and code interpreters. Build agents and multi-agents to solve complex tasks.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualification:
- Currently enrolled in a PhD degree in Computer Science, Linguistics, Statistics, or related technical field.
- Excellent knowledge of theory and practice of LLM and foundation model, as well as deep learning.
- Strong publication record at leading conferences (ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML etc.).
- Excellent coding ability, familiar with data structures, and fundamental algorithm skills, proficient in C/C++ or Python, winners of competitions such as ACM/ICPC, USACO/NOI/IOI, Top Coder, Kaggle, etc. are preferred;
- Good communication and collaboration skills, able to explore new technologies with the team and promote technological progress.

Preferred Qualifications
- Demonstrated software engineering or natural language processing, deep learning experience from previous internship, work experience, coding competitions, or publications.
- High levels of creativity and quick problem-solving capabilities.

TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://shorturl.at/cdpT2

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description Intern (hourly)

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60- $60. We cover 100% premium coverage for Full-Time intern medical insurance after 90 days from the date of hire. Medical coverage only, no dental or vision coverage.​

Our time off and leave plans are: Paid holidays and paid sick leave. The sick leave entitlement is based on the time you join.​

We also provide mental and emotional health benefits through our Employee Assistance Program and provide reimbursements for your mobile phone expense. 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.​