PhD Intern – Responsible AI Safety

Job Description

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

The Tone:
This is a PhD internship at ByteDance, with laboratories and career opportunities across China, Singapore, and the United States, including potential placement in Los Angeles. ByteDance’s Seed team, established in 2023, is dedicated to pioneering new paths toward artificial general intelligence, driving progress for both technology and society. They build industry-leading general foundation models and cutting-edge multimodal capabilities that power over 50 application scenarios and serve enterprise customers. This role is crucial for the Seed-Responsible AI team, whose mission is to promote safe and sustainable AI by researching its core mechanisms, providing insights, and practical guidance to ensure AI technologies are reliable, safe, and trustworthy.

The TL;DR
• Role: Internship
• Location: In-person, Los Angeles, CA
• Pay: $60 hourly
• Team: Seed-Responsible AI team, part of the ByteDance Seed team
• Mission: To provide insights and practical guidance for safe and sustainable AI by researching its core mechanisms.
• Tech Stack: C/C++, Python

What You’ll Actually Do
• Developing AI Technologies: Develop advanced technologies in AI, specifically AI foundation models and AI agents, contributing to the frontier of intelligence.
• Conducting Safety Research: Conduct research on AI technologies to make them more reliable, safe, and trustworthy, thereby ensuring sustainable AI development.
• Contributing to Products: Contribute to the development of company products with a focus on embedding AI safety and AI ethics, guiding practical applications.
• Promoting Responsible AI: Promote safe and sustainable AI by researching its core mechanisms, providing critical insights and practical guidance.
• Advancing AI Frontier: Contribute to ByteDance’s mission to advance the frontier of intelligence to drive progress for both technology and society.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field. This internship is designed for students seeking to contribute actively to research and emerging technologies.
• Experience: Possess a strong research background in at least one of the following specialized areas: large language model (LLM) training, LLM interpretability, LLM agents, reinforcement learning, or LLM / AI agent safety.
• Skills: Demonstrate excellent coding ability, data structures, and fundamental algorithm skills, with proficiency in C/C++ or Python. Exhibit excellent problem analysis and solving skills, coupled with good communication and collaboration abilities.
• Bonus: Winners of competitions such as ACM/ICPC, IOI, TopCoder etc. are preferred. Experience with influential projects or papers in ML, NLP, LLM is preferred.