Research Scientist Intern (TikTok-Neural Graphics and World Models) - 2027 Start (PhD)

Location: San Jose, California, United States of America Department: Algorithm

About the Role

We are looking for Research Scientist interns to work on foundational problems in neural graphics and world models.

You will own a scoped project in one primary research focus track, such as model development, data strategy, evaluation, or interactive prototyping. You will work with other engineers to connect successful models and experiments to data, runtime, and engine pipelines.

This role is intended for candidates with strong research potential who enjoy turning ideas into working experiments, analyzing failures, and building useful prototypes.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship. PhD internships at Our Company provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, as well as to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and professional development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Please clearly state your availability in your resume (Start date, End date).

Responsibilities

• Study relevant research, reproduce strong baselines, and identify practical extensions.
• Develop and evaluate models, algorithms, data methods, or evaluation methods in a scoped research area.
• Build components of training, inference, data, or evaluation workflows using modern ML frameworks.
• Run controlled experiments, analyze model behavior, and communicate findings clearly.
• Create research prototypes for interactive graphics, creative tools, or engine-based workflows.
• Produce reproducible research artifacts, clear documentation, demonstrations, and technical reports.

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD degree in a relevant technical field.
• Able to commit to working for 12 weeks during the Summer of 2027.
• Research experience through a laboratory, thesis, publication, internship, open-source project, or substantial independent project. Strong, up-to-date foundation in machine learning, generative modeling, and experimental methodology, with hands-on experience building, training, fine-tuning, or evaluating models using frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Familiarity with modern generative architectures and training methods such as variational autoencoders, latent tokenizers, diffusion or flow-matching models, diffusion transformers, autoregressive models, multimodal transformers, long-context modeling, pre-training, or post-training.
• Engineering fluency with model development workflows and the ability to reason about model architecture, training dynamics, data quality, and evaluation results.
• Deep experience in at least one of the following AI-for-graphics areas: 3D modeling, asset generation, or 3D representations; animation or motion generation; simulation or physics-aware learning; rendering or neural rendering; world models or video prediction; or graphics and game-engine workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

• Peer-reviewed publications at leading venues such as SIGGRAPH, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, RSS, CoRL, or related research communities.
• Strong technical reports, open-source contributions, demos, project pages, or research projects that show technical depth, originality, and independent experimentation.
• Experience with 3D or world generation conditioned on text, images, video, actions, or structured scene inputs.
• Interest in collaborating with Software Engineers to move research prototypes into interactive engine pipelines.
• Ability to understand recent research, design controlled experiments, analyze failures, and contribute to model training, data, or evaluation workflows.

By submitting an application for this role, you accept and agree to our global applicant privacy policy, which may be accessed here: https://careers.tiktok.com/legal/privacy

As a condition of employment, all successful candidates must be able to establish authorization to work in the United States. For this position, the Company does not provide sponsorship or any immigration-related benefits.