PhD Research Intern – Low-power Sensing

Job Description

Research Scientist Intern – Multimodal Sensing & On-Device Perception – Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program – 2027 Start (PhD) | ByteDance

The Tone:
This is a PhD Research Scientist Internship, scheduled for a 2027 start, at ByteDance. ByteDance’s mission centers on inspiring creativity and enriching lives by enabling authentic self-expression and connection through innovative global products. This specific internship is within Pico Lab, a VR company founded in 2015, dedicated to developing immersive VR experiences and tailored enterprise solutions in education and healthcare. The role is critical as it connects AI Agents to the physical world, focusing on intelligent hardware that perceives environments and recognizes user intent for improved everyday service. The internship experience offers students hands-on learning, community building, and collaboration with industry experts, with the goal of contributing to ByteDance’s products, research, and emerging technologies.

The TL;DR
• Role: PhD Internship
• Location: In-person, San Jose, CA
• Pay: $55 hourly
• Team: PICO Lab, focusing on eye tracking system architecture for compact wearable devices.
• Mission: To overcome conventional visual perception limits by deeply integrating sensing and computing, enabling highly energy-efficient, real-time understanding in intelligent hardware.

What You’ll Actually Do
• Research: Research, prototype, and evaluate novel image sensor-based sensing approaches for wearable form factors, emphasizing low-power, always-on operation.
• Model Design: Design and train machine learning models, utilizing computer vision and language modeling to interpret complex spatio-temporal data.
• Performance Assessment: Design and run simulations to assess perception system performance across representative operating conditions.
• Co-design Exploration: Explore hardware/software co-design opportunities, including on-sensor or near-sensor compute, to meet stringent power targets.
• Prototype Development: Build end-to-end hardware prototypes by integrating image sensors, optics, and structured light components.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field.
• Experience: Strong research background in computer vision and machine learning, with hands-on model training experience. Experience with at least one of: sequence modeling, language modeling, efficient neural network design, or signal processing.
• Skills: Computer vision, machine learning, language modeling, imaging systems, hardware/software co-design, model training, efficient neural network design, signal processing.
• Bonus: Proven track record of high-impact research (publications in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGGRAPH), hands-on experience with hardware prototyping (cameras, structured light, active sensing systems), familiarity with on-device or on-sensor compute, embedded ML deployment, and hardware/software co-design tradeoffs. Self-motivated, curious, and excited about taking ambitious research ideas from prototype to working system.