About the role#
This PhD internship focuses on building a next-generation content understanding system for monetization. You will join the Business Integrity team to help create an ecosystem that balances user experience with advertiser value. The team works to solve complex moderation challenges, including adversarial tactics and the need for interpretable reasoning in automated systems.
What you'll do#
- Build a leading moderation system that provides accurate rejection decisions.
- Enable end-to-end capabilities for interpretable reasoning and intelligent remediation.
- Work toward fully automated moderation that performs better than human benchmarks.
What you'll need#
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline, with graduation expected within 12 months.
- Hands-on experience implementing, training, or deploying models in areas such as Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies.
- Practical experience with large language models, including pre-training, fine-tuning, prompting, inference, or deployment.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including clean code, version control, and system debugging.
- Proficiency in Python and at least one deep learning framework like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- A collaborative mindset and interest in applying AI to real-world products.
- Preferred experience includes large-scale distributed training (DeepSpeed, Megatron, FSDP), high-throughput inference (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM), production deployment, or building data pipelines.
- Bonus points for open-source contributions, success in ML competitions like Kaggle or ACM/ICPC, or granted patents.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California.
- Modality: On-site.
- Employment: Full-time internship.
- Term: Rolling.
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.
