Research Engineer, PhD Intern – Machine Learning, Content Moderation

Job Description

Applied Scientist Intern – Business Integrity – Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program – 2027 Start (PhD) | TikTok

The Tone:
This is a PhD internship at TikTok, a leading destination for short-form mobile video. The company’s global mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy through its innovative product, connecting people from across the globe. This role supports the Business Integrity team, which holds a strong user focus and dedication to technical excellence. The team aims to meet user needs with reliable and high-performing platforms and services. The intern will actively contribute to building a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization, directly impacting the platform’s ability to handle increasingly complex and evolving moderation challenges. This position is vital for creating an ecosystem that rewards high-quality user experience and advertiser value.

The TL;DR
• Role: Internship (PhD)
• Location: Los Angeles, CA
• Pay: $60 hourly
• Team: Business Integrity team, focused on user needs, technical excellence, and content monetization.
• Mission: Build a leading moderation system that provides accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and intelligent remediation, surpassing human performance benchmarks.

What You’ll Actually Do
• Contribute to Products & Research: Actively contribute to TikTok’s ongoing products, research initiatives, and strategic plans concerning the organization’s future and emerging technologies.
• Develop Machine Learning Models: Build highly scalable machine learning models specifically designed to enhance the content understanding system for TikTok monetization.
• Partner with Global Teams: Collaborate across various disciplines and with global teams to achieve excellence in platform performance within an enriching internship experience.
• Build Automated Moderation System: Design and implement a leading end-to-end moderation system that enables accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and intelligent remediation.
• Advance Content Understanding: Create an ecosystem that effectively rewards high-quality user experience and advertiser value on the platform, addressing complex moderation scenarios.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Currently pursuing a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Experience: Modeling experience in one or more areas such as Ads, Search engines, Recommender Systems, NLP/CV, multimodal systems, or agent technologies, alongside practical experience in single-modal LLM application and deployment.
• Skills: A solid foundation in algorithms related to Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Bonus: Strong publication record in top conferences including ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, NCVPR, ICCV, or ECCV.