About the role#
The Recommendation Foundation team builds shared models for e-commerce scenarios. We focus on event-sequence-driven generative recommendation by integrating large language and vision-language models, multimodal understanding, and reinforcement learning. Our goal is to move recommendation systems beyond simple click prediction toward general-purpose agents. You will work in an environment that values original exploration, research thinking, and engineering practice.
What you'll do#
- Participate in the full training lifecycle of Recommendation Foundation Models, covering pre-training, mid-training, and post-training.
- Design and train multimodal semantic tokenizers for recommendation items to encode item content into discrete tokens.
- Develop LLM-native recommendation by incorporating tasks directly into large language model training to improve quality.
- Build new recommendation systems that span retrieval, ranking, and end-to-end generative recommendation.
What you'll need#
- Current enrollment in a PhD program for Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
- A solid foundation in machine learning and deep learning with an interest in LLMs and generative recommendation.
- Proficiency in Python and experience with PyTorch.
- A self-driven work style with strong research and engineering skills.
- Experience with pre-training, mid-training, or post-training of LLMs or Foundation Models.
- Research or project experience in generative recommendation, LLM-native recommendation, or multimodal semantic tokenization.
- Publications at top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, or NAACL, or achievements in major technical competitions.
Location & details#
- Location: Seattle, Washington.
- Employment: Full-time internship.
- Modality: On-site.
- Compensation: $57 per hour.
- Process: 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
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