TikTok

Research Scientist Graduate (Monetization Technology - Business Integrity) - 2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok$162K — $316K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • PhD in Computer Science or related field (or expected within 12 months)
  • Research experience in Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, or related areas
  • Understanding of large language models, including evaluation methodology
  • Ability to independently design and conduct research experiments
  • Proficient in Python and a deep learning framework (PyTorch or TensorFlow)
  • Strong problem-solving skills with a focus on collaborative innovation.

Responsibilities

  • Develop a leading moderation system for accurate content moderation decisions
  • Create end-to-end capabilities for interpretable reasoning and remediation
  • Achieve fully automated moderation performance exceeding human benchmarks
  • Collaborate across disciplines to enhance machine learning models
  • Engage in research to address complex content moderation challenges.
  • Interpret and address evolving moderation rules and adversarial tactics.

Benefits

  • Day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance
  • 401(k) plan with company match
  • Paid parental leave
  • Short-term and long-term disability coverage
  • Life insurance
  • Wellbeing benefits
  • 10 paid holidays per year
  • 10 paid sick days per year
  • 17 days of Paid Personal Time that increases with tenure
Full Job Description
Responsibilities

Our Business Integrity team has a strong user focus and a dedication to technical excellence. We aim to meet our users' needs with reliable and high-performing platforms and services. We are looking for strong machine learning engineers who are excited to grow their business understanding, build highly scalable machine learning models, and partner across disciplines with global teams, in pursuit of excellence. Given the fast growth of TikTok in the world, we are working on building a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization. We are seeking Research Engineers who are experienced in machine learning, which can help us create an ecosystem that rewards high-quality user experience and advertiser value. Topic Content: With the explosive growth of digital content, intelligent moderation has become a core capability for internet platforms. However, as moderation scenarios grow increasingly complex and adversarial tactics continue to evolve, traditional approaches are facing unprecedented challenges. The current landscape is characterized by multiple technical difficulties, including the dynamic nature of moderation rules, content complexity, sample scarcity, escalating adversarial behaviors, and a lack of interpretability. In particular, existing open-source large models often do not perform as effective as we expect in scenarios involving evolving moderation rules, long-form text, long temporal sequences, multi-languages, limited sample data, and adversarial content generated by AIGC. We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume. Responsibilities: In this role, you will build a leading moderation system that enables end-to-end capabilities for accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and intelligent remediation, achieving fully automated moderation with performance surpassing human benchmarks.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications: - Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline (completed, or expecting to graduate within 12 months). - Research experience in one or more of the following areas - Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies - demonstrated through publications, thesis work, internships, or research projects. - Solid understanding of large language model methodology, including pre-training, post-training/alignment, and evaluation, with the ability to read, reproduce, and critique recent literature. - Ability to independently formulate a research problem, design controlled experiments, and draw sound conclusions from ambiguous results. - Proficient in Python and at least one deep learning framework such as PyTorch or TensorFlow. - Strong problem-solving ability, a collaborative mindset, and a genuine interest in translating research into real-world products. Preferred Qualifications: - Publications at top-tier venues (ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, TPAMI), or equivalent evidence of research ability. - Experience with RLHF / post-training, reasoning, or novel model architecture design. - Experience designing evaluation benchmarks or LLM/VLM-as-Judge methodologies. - Experience building agentic systems, RAG pipelines, or multimodal applications. - Track record of research that shipped into a production system.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency]Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $162000 - $316800 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate's qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. Exercising sound judgment.

About TikTok

TikTok is a social media app that allows users to create and share short videos. The app was launched in 2016 by Chinese tech company ByteDance. TikTok has become one of the most popular social media apps in the world, with over 1 billion active users. The app has been downloaded over 2 billion times worldwide. TikTok has faced controversy over its data privacy practices and its potential ties to the Chinese government. In 2020, the app faced a potential ban in the United States, but a deal was reached with Oracle and Walmart to create a new company called TikTok Global.
Learn more about TikTok
Size
1,750 employees
Industry
Founded
2012

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