About the role#
We are looking for a Research Scientist Intern to join our Business Integrity team for the Summer 2027 term. You will work on building a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization. This role focuses on advancing moderation technology to create an ecosystem that balances user experience and advertiser value.
What you'll do#
- Build a leading moderation system that provides end-to-end capabilities for accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and intelligent remediation.
- Work toward achieving fully automated moderation that exceeds human performance benchmarks.
- Design controlled experiments and formulate research problems independently.
- Translate research findings into real-world production systems.
What you'll need#
- Currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical field. We will also consider exceptional Bachelor's candidates with strong research output.
- Research experience in areas such as Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies.
- Solid understanding of large language model methodology, including pre-training, alignment, and evaluation.
- Proficiency in Python and at least one deep learning framework like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- A collaborative mindset and strong problem-solving skills.
- Preferred: Publications at top-tier venues (such as ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, or TPAMI) or equivalent research evidence.
- Preferred: Experience with RLHF, post-training, novel model architecture design, evaluation benchmarks, agentic systems, or RAG pipelines.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California.
- Term: Summer 2027.
- Modality: On-site.
- Employment type: Full-time intern.
- Compensation: $45 per hour.
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.
