PhD Intern, Responsible AI – AI Safety Research

Job Description

Research Scientist Intern (Seed Responsible AI) – 2026 Start (PhD) | ByteDance

The Tone:
This is a PhD internship at ByteDance, a company dedicated to inspiring creativity and advancing artificial general intelligence through its Seed team. The Seed-Responsible AI team promotes safe and sustainable AI by researching its core mechanisms. This role is crucial for developing insights and practical guidance to ensure AI technologies are reliable, safe, and trustworthy, contributing to the organization’s future plans and emerging technologies.

The TL;DR
• Role: Internship
• Type: Temporary
• Location: In-person (Global opportunities in US, China, Singapore)
• Pay: $60 hourly
• Team: Seed-Responsible AI team, part of the ByteDance Seed team
• Mission: To conduct research and develop advanced technologies that make AI foundation models and agents more reliable, safe, and trustworthy for company products and society.
• Tech Stack: C/C++, Python

What You’ll Actually Do
• Develop: Advance technologies in AI, specifically focusing on AI foundation models and AI agents.
• Research: Conduct in-depth research to enhance the reliability, safety, and trustworthiness of AI technologies.
• Contribute: Support the development of company products by applying principles of AI safety and AI ethics.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience: Strong research background in large language model (LLM) training, LLM interpretability, LLM agents, reinforcement learning, or LLM / AI agent safety. Experience with influential projects or papers in ML, NLP, or LLM is preferred.
• Skills: Excellent coding ability, proficiency in C/C++ or Python, strong understanding of data structures and fundamental algorithms, excellent problem analysis and solving skills, and good communication and collaboration skills.
• Bonus: Winners of competitions such as ACM/ICPC, IOI, or TopCoder are preferred.