About the role#
This PhD internship focuses on the core advertising systems that power TikTok. You will work within the Recommendation AI Lab to integrate foundation models into our advertising infrastructure. The goal is to build an intelligent engine capable of autonomous decision-making while balancing monetization efficiency with user experience. You will tackle challenges involving trillion-level features and millisecond response times.
What you'll do#
- Explore scaling laws for foundation models within recommendation and advertising contexts.
- Build foundation models based on unified multimodal semantic modeling.
- Create an intelligent ad placement system optimized for long-term user value and return on ad spend.
- Balance commercial goals with user experience.
- Optimize training and online inference frameworks for foundation models.
- Manage the trade-off between computing power costs and real-time performance.
- Resolve performance and latency issues in real-world deployments.
What you'll need#
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Modeling experience in ads, search engines, recommender systems, NLP, or computer vision.
- Solid foundation in LLM algorithms and practical experience with single-modal LLM deployment.
- Excellent programming skills with a strong command of data structures and algorithms.
- Proficiency in C/C++ for traditional coding roles or Python for intelligent coding roles.
- Research results in fields like natural language processing, computer vision, data modeling, or algorithm optimization are a plus.
- A strong record of publications in top conferences such as ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, or ICCV is preferred.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California.
- This is an on-site, full-time internship.
- Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
About TikTok
TikTok operates as an entertainment provider. The company maintains a global presence with offices in cities including Los Angeles, Singapore, New York, London, and Tokyo. It employs over 92,000 people. The organization is privately held.
How to get in at TikTok
Landing an internship at TikTok requires speed because early applicants often get seen before the pile grows. Intern Insider sends an instant alert the moment a role matching your target is published anywhere, so you can apply among the first. This gives you a better chance of your resume being reviewed while the team is still actively filling the position. You should aim to be one of the first people to submit your materials. Reaching out to the right person can also improve your chances of getting a response. Intern Insider surfaces the recruiters behind the company roles so you can contact them directly to ask about the role or a referral. This direct approach often works better than waiting for a response from a general application queue.
