Algorithm

LLM Algorithm Research Scientist - Code AI intern (AI Innovation Center) - 2026 Soaring Star Talent Program

Location
:

Singapore

Employment Type
:

Intern

Job Code
:

A153191A

Responsibilities

Team Introduction:
The TikTok AI Innovation Center is a department focused on building AI infrastructure and driving cutting-edge research in AI. We explore industry-leading AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large models, with the goal of developing models that can understand multilingual content and vast amounts of video data, ultimately delivering a better content consumption experience for users. In the Code AI domain, we leverage the powerful code understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to enhance program performance and R&D efficiency.

Project Introduction:
Multimodal foundation large models (VLM) represent a research hotspot in the industry and a critical technology for TikTok's business scenario applications. In 2024, TikTok's Innovation Center developed VFM V1, a multimodal large model tailored for TikTok's business scenarios. It matches the performance of the best open-source model Qwen VL on public test sets, while significantly outperforming all other foundation models on TikTok's business test sets. In the future, we aim to continuously develop foundation models with efficient perception and reasoning capabilities, capable of handling multilingual and massive video content understanding algorithms to deliver a better content consumption experience for users.

Project Challenges:
Enhance the multimodal perception encoder: The current encoder uses a fixed frame rate. We need to explore more efficient adaptive frame rates while considering the integration of modalities such as audio and user behavior.
How to fuse multimodal perception and thinking capabilities to promote stronger comprehensive perception and cognitive abilities of the model.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• a PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP/CV, Systems, or related fields (or equivalent research experience).
• Strong programming and debugging skills in Python and/or C/C++; solid data structures & algorithms foundation.
• Hands-on experience in at least one:

1. LLMs / generative AI training or adaptation (pretrain, SFT, RL, etc.)
2. Code intelligence (code understanding/generation, static analysis, compilers/tooling, program repair)
3. Agentic systems (tool-use, planning, multi-step reasoning, environment interaction)

• Strong experimental rigor: hypothesis-driven iteration, reproducibility, and clear communication.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Publications in top venues (e.g., NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR/ACL/CVPR, and/or systems venues like OSDI/NSDI/SOSP, etc.).
• Experience with one or more of:

1. Long-context modeling, retrieval systems, RAG over code, repo-scale indexing
2. RLHF / verifier-based RL / preference optimization for code tasks
3. Multi-agent collaboration frameworks and evaluation
4. Performance engineering: profiling (CPU/heap), latency optimization, cost optimization, or GPU kernel work

• Programming / competitions (ACM/ICPC, IOI/NOI, Kaggle, TopCoder) is a plus.

If you have any questions, please reach out to us at apac-earlycareers@tiktok.com

Job Information

About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

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Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.

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We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

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Diversity & Inclusion

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TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.