Algorithm Intern – Multimodal AI for Content Safety

Job Description

Machine Learning Engineer Intern (Trust and Safety – CV/NLP/Multimodal LLM) – 2026 Summer (BS/MS) | TikTok

The Tone:
This is an internship at TikTok, located in Los Angeles, CA, with potential eligibility for housing allowance if not working 100% remotely. TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video, aiming to inspire creativity and bring joy to its global user base. This role is crucial within the algorithm team, where the focus is on developing advanced computer vision, natural language processing, and multimodality models to safeguard the platform and its users from content and behaviors that violate community guidelines and regulations. The work directly contributes to providing a secure and enjoyable user experience worldwide by improving the recognition of violated content.

The TL;DR
• Role: Internship
• Type: Temporary (12 weeks)
• Location: In-person, Los Angeles, CA
• Pay: $42.75 hourly
• Team: Algorithm team, responsible for developing state-of-the-art computer vision, NLP, and multimodality models and algorithms.
• Mission: Develop cutting-edge content understanding models to improve the recognition of violated content and optimize distributed model training frameworks.
• Tech Stack: PyTorch, TensorFlow

What You’ll Actually Do
• Model Development: Build moderation models with strong generalization capabilities by exploring few-shot and zero-shot strategies using multimodal large models for content safety scenarios.
• Data Mining & Framework Design: Participate in reinforcement learning-based data mining and help design Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotation frameworks to improve the model’s understanding of complex risks.
• System Building: Construct risk ranking and recall systems to enhance coverage and accuracy in identifying high-risk content.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Work with product and policy teams to drive real-world deployment and optimize the performance of moderation algorithms.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Currently pursuing a Master’s degree with a background in computer science, machine learning, or similar fields.
• Experience: Solid foundation in machine learning and deep learning, familiarity with multimodal modeling, and proficient in end-to-end algorithm development including data processing, modeling, and evaluation.
• Skills: Hands-on experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow is required, with an interest in content safety and an understanding of risk identification challenges in moderation workflows.
• Bonus: Strong learning ability, clear communication skills, and a strong sense of teamwork and responsibility.