Research Scientist Graduate – Business Integrity (PhD)

About the role

Join TikTok's Business Integrity team as a Graduate Research Scientist focused on cutting‑edge AI. You will explore the frontiers of large language models, multimodal models, and agentic AI to build next‑generation content understanding and generation systems for commercial ecosystems.

Key responsibilities

• Conduct foundational research on large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large models (MLLMs), probing capability boundaries for agentic scenarios.
• Design and evaluate innovative post‑training paradigms, including chain‑of‑thought reasoning, long‑horizon planning, tool use, and reinforcement‑learning‑based alignment (e.g., PPO, GRPO, RLHF).
• Develop model architectures for autonomous decision‑making, reflection, and safety‑critical behavior.
• Investigate frontier visual generation techniques such as diffusion and flow‑matching to strengthen perception and environment simulation for multimodal agents.
• Lead algorithmic innovation for agentic AI, addressing reinforcement learning, logical reasoning, long‑term memory, knowledge injection, and multi‑agent collaboration.
• Define evaluation frameworks for next‑generation AIGC and agent systems, tackling long‑tail generalization, interpretability, and multimodal alignment in large‑scale commercial contexts.

Required profile

• PhD or equivalent graduate degree in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related field, with a planned start in 2027.
• Ability to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the current year; clearly state availability and graduation date in the resume.
• Strong publication record in top AI conferences is a plus.

Required skills

• Experience with large language models and multimodal model research.
• Knowledge of reinforcement learning techniques (PPO, GRPO, RLHF).
• Familiarity with diffusion and flow‑matching visual generation methods.
• Proficiency in designing evaluation metrics for AI systems.

What we offer

• Opportunity to work on high‑impact AI research that directly influences TikTok's commercial products.
• Access to world‑class computing resources and a collaborative research environment.
• Support for publishing at top conferences and translating research into production.