Research Intern - Video World Models (Research & ML Systems)

Tencent

$80K — $124K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Currently pursuing a PhD or Master's with a standout research/engineering track record in Computer Science or related fields.
  • Exceptional programming skills in Python and potentially other languages; competitive programming experience is a plus.
  • Knowledge of AI infrastructure and large-scale machine learning systems like PyTorch FSDP and Megatron.
  • Experience with GPU kernels using CUDA and/or Triton is advantageous.
  • Strong grasp of modern generative techniques, including Diffusion and Transformers.
  • First-author publications in renowned AI or ML systems journals or conferences.

Responsibilities

  • Design, train, and scale innovative interactive world models using state-of-the-art techniques.
  • Develop scalable distributed training pipelines to improve efficiency on large-scale computing clusters.
  • Profile and optimize model architectures to mitigate compute and memory bottlenecks.
  • Write high-performance custom hardware kernels to enhance Model FLOPs Utilization for real-time inference.

Benefits

  • 1 hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked.
  • Up to 13 paid holidays throughout the year.
  • Eligibility for company-sponsored medical plan for full-time interns.
Full Job Description
What the Role Entails
About the Position
We are seeking an exceptional Research Intern to join our core team in building the next generation of interactive Video World Models. While traditional generative AI focuses on generating passive pixels (e.g., text-to-video), our mission is fundamentally more ambitious: we are building foundational "World Models" that inherently understand physics, causality, action spaces, and complex dynamics directly from internet-scale data. Our goal is to train models that can simulate and "dream" complex virtual worlds, allowing users and agents to explore and interact with them in real time.

This is not a purely theoretical role.
Training interactive world models at this scale requires pushing the limits of modern computing power. We operate at the intersection of cutting-edge generative AI research and high-performance machine learning systems. We are looking for "full-stack" hacker-researchers-visionary thinkers who are also elite engineers, capable of co-designing novel neural architectures and engineering the highly optimized infrastructure required to train them across large-scale computing cluster.

What You Will Do
  • Architect & Scale Foundation Models: Design, train, and scale state-of-the-art interactive world models (combining Diffusion, Autoregressive Transformers, VAEs, LLMs, VLMs) on massive video datasets.
  • Push the Boundaries of ML Systems: Architect highly scalable distributed training pipelines, utilizing advanced model and data parallelism to train massive models efficiently on large-scale computing cluters.
  • Optimize for Efficiency: Profile and optimize model architectures to break through memory and compute bottlenecks. Write high-performance, custom hardware kernels to maximize Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) and enable real-time, low-latency inference.


Who We Look For

Requirements
  • Academic Excellence: Currently pursuing a PhD (or Master's degree with a truly exceptional research/engineering track record) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Architecture, or a related field.
  • Engineering Skills: Exceptional, production-level coding proficiency in Python or other languages. Background in competitive programming is a great plus.
  • AI Infrastructure & Scaling: Experience with modern AI infrastructure stack and large-scale machine learning systems, such as PyTorch FSDP, Megatron, etc. Experience with GPU kernels using CUDA and/or Triton is a great plus.
  • Deep Generative Expertise: Thorough theoretical and practical understanding of modern generative paradigms (Diffusion, Vision Transformers, Autoregressive sequence modeling, discrete tokenization/VAEs).
  • Top-Tier Publication Record: First-author publications in top-tier AI venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV) OR premier ML Systems venues (MLSys, OSDI, ASPLOS).


Location State(s)

US-California-Palo Alto

The expected base pay range for this position in the location(s) listed above is $80,168.40 to $124,800.00 per year. Actual pay may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.This position will be eligible for 1 hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked and up to 13 paid holidays throughout the calendar year. Subject to the terms and conditions of the applicable plans then in effect, full-time interns are also eligible to enroll in the Company-sponsored medical plan.

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