PhD Intern, Trust and Safety Algorithm Team

Job Description

About the Company

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video, with a mission to inspire creativity and bring joy to everyone in the world. Its global headquarters are located in Los Angeles and Singapore, with additional offices in major cities worldwide including New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

TikTok’s culture is built around a commitment to diversity and inclusion, aiming to create an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. They strive to reflect the diverse communities their platform reaches. The company emphasizes creativity, authentic self-expression, discovery, and connection.

Key values highlighted include:
• Curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company.
• Embracing challenges as opportunities to learn and innovate as one team.
• A resilient approach, constantly iterating and fostering an “Always Day 1” mindset to achieve meaningful breakthroughs for employees, the company, and users.
• A commitment to providing reasonable accommodations in their recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs, or other protected reasons.

About the Job

This job description is for a PhD Intern (2026) position within the Trust and Safety algorithm team at TikTok. This team is crucial for protecting the platform and its users from content and behaviors that violate community guidelines and related regulations by developing state-of-the-art AI models. The continuous efforts of this team aim to ensure the best user experience and bring joy to TikTok’s global audience.

Responsibilities:

As a PhD Intern in this team, you will be deeply involved in cutting-edge AI research and development focused on content understanding and safety. Your core responsibilities will include:

• Developing computer vision and multimodality models specifically designed to recognize violating content within TikTok’s vast ecosystem.
• Exploring and applying cutting-edge multimodal and computer vision large models, such as CLIP, COCA, ALBEF, BLIP, Flamingo, ViT-G, ViT-22B, and EVA-enormous, to enhance content recognition capabilities.
• Investigating the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various business scenarios, including pre-training, zero-shot/few-shot learning techniques, and hard case mining for moderation challenges.
• Continuously optimizing the distributed model training framework to better adapt to and facilitate the efficient training of large-scale AI models.

Internship Experience:

TikTok’s PhD internships offer a dynamic experience that combines:
• Hands-on learning through active contribution to real-world products and research.
• Enriching community-building and development events designed to foster collaboration and growth.
• Collaboration with industry experts within the Trust and Safety algorithm team and across the organization.
The internship provides an opportunity to contribute significantly to the organization’s future plans and emerging technologies.

Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:
• Currently a PhD candidate in computer science or a closely related technical discipline.
• Demonstrated related research experience in at least one of the following key areas: computer vision, multimodality, or Large Language Models (LLM).
• Proficiency with at least one major deep learning framework, such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Possession of excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, strong logical thinking abilities, and effective communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications:
• Having published papers in top-tier AI conferences or journals is a significant plus. This includes prestigious venues like CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NIPS, ICML, ICLR, TPAMI, and IJCV.

Application Process:

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, so candidates are strongly encouraged to apply early. It is essential to clearly state your availability (start date and end date) in your resume.

Compensation and Benefits:

For this campus intern position, the hourly rate range is $57-$57.
Interns receive a comprehensive benefits package, which may vary based on employment nature and country work location. Benefits include:
• Day one access to health insurance, life insurance, and wellbeing benefits.
• 10 paid holidays per year.
• Paid sick time (56 hours if hired in the first half of the year, 40 hours if hired in the second half of the year).
• Interns not working 100% remote may also be eligible for a housing allowance.
• *Note: The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time.•
Specific Information for Los Angeles County (Unincorporated) Candidates:

For candidates in Los Angeles County (unincorporated), qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered in accordance with federal, state, and local laws, including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. The company believes that criminal history may directly and negatively impact job duties related to:
• Interacting and having unsupervised contact with clients/colleagues.
• Handling confidential, proprietary, and trade secret information, and accessing IT systems.
• Exercising sound judgment. This could potentially lead to the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment.