Data Science Intern – Platform Safety

Job Description

Data Scientist Intern (Integrity and Safety) – 2026 Start (PhD) | TikTok

The Tone:
This is a PhD internship at TikTok, a company known for its leading short-form mobile video platform. This role directly contributes to safeguarding content, users, and privacy across various critical areas including video content safety, live content safety, account security, privacy compliance, and moderation platforms. You will provide critical data-driven insights for platform responsibility and safety initiatives, ultimately enhancing the safety experience for millions of users worldwide. The internship offers hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

The TL;DR
• Role: Internship
• Pay: $55 hourly
• Team: Integrity and Safety team
• Mission: To safeguard content, users, and privacy on TikTok by providing data-driven insights for platform responsibility and safety initiatives.
• Tech Stack: SQL, Python, R

What You’ll Actually Do
• Risk Monitoring: Design and maintain core indicator systems for platform content security and risks, including content violations, user feedback, and account risks; participate in building monitoring and anomaly attribution systems to quickly identify and analyze security incidents.
• Strategy Evaluation: Apply statistical methods, such as A/B testing, causal inference, and regression analysis, to assist in evaluating the effectiveness of various security strategies, providing data support for business decisions.
• Quantitative Analysis: Conduct quantitative analysis for specific business challenges, using data mining techniques to identify potential optimization opportunities and collaborating with product, operations, and algorithm teams to transform insights into actionable improvement plans.
• Data Quality: Participate in data cleaning and preprocessing work to ensure data quality and provide a reliable data foundation for comprehensive risk analysis.
• Reporting: Generate data visualization reports and monitoring dashboards to help teams intuitively understand risk situations and the effectiveness of implemented strategies.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Currently pursuing a PhD in Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, Data Science, or hold equivalent practical experience.
• Experience: Familiarity with common statistical analysis methods, along with data processing and analysis experience.
• Skills: Proficient in SQL, Python, or R; excellent logical thinking; strong problem analysis and solving skills; good communication and collaboration abilities.
• Bonus: Understanding of machine learning, causal inference, and A/B testing methods and principles; prior internship experience in internet companies; ability to quickly learn new knowledge and skills; high awareness of data security and privacy protection.