Research Scientist Graduate, GenAI (TikTok Recommendation) - 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.

Our team's mission is to empower genAI and content understanding in TikTok businesses. Computer vision and natural language processing are important dimensions in both content generation and understanding. We are working on various foundational models, including multi-modality pretraining, multi-modal large language model, image generation, video generation etc. As a genAI team on the business side, we try to succeed in both achieving business metric gains (recommendation metrics), and also producing state-of-the-art research outputs.

We are looking for strong research scientist 2025 Graduates , who are excited about growing their business understanding, building scalable and high-performance models and systems, and partnering across disciplines with global teams, in pursuit of excellence.

Responsibilities
1. Conducting development and research on cutting-edge CV, NLP, multi-modality, LLM, generative modeling
2. Following SoTA progress in relevant fields and transform the ideas into production
3. Life-cycle model development, from model training, deployment, maintenance, till its use in business scenarios.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:
1. PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related field.
2. Experience in one of more areas of computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning
Solid knowledge and experience with at least one major deep learning framework (e.g. PyTorch, Tensorflow, MXNet, Caffe/Caffe2).
3. Familiar with deep neural network architectures such as transformer/SSM/CNN/RNN/LSTM etc.
4. Strong analytical and problem solving skills. Ability to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams.

Preferred Qualifications:
1. Degree in computer science, electrical engineering or related fields
2. Authors with publications in top-tier venues such as SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR

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 (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $137750 - $237500 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate's qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

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.