Researcher Intern (Vision and Graphics) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Location: San Jose, California, United States of America Department: R&D

Our team's mission is to empower content interaction and creation using CV related technologies. We focus on cutting-edge R&D in areas like video understanding, multimodal understanding, image and video synthesis, 3D vision and intelligent editing. We are looking for Research Interns in the area of computer vision and machine learning at all levels at TikTok.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2026. Internships at TikTok aim to offer students industry exposure and hands-on experience. Turn your ambitions into reality as your inspiration brings infinite opportunities at TikTok.

PhD

PhD internships at TikTok provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

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

RESPONSIBILITIES

This internship provides students the opportunity to join one of our engineering teams where you will have the opportunity to:

• Build new features that touch hundreds of millions of people around the world
• Solve unique, large-scale, highly complex technical problems
• Build the next-generation monetization platform to help millions of customers grow their businesses
• Work with your mentor to deliver product features and make engineering improvements
• Build world-class web applications that combine usability, accessibility, elegance, performance, and maintainability
• Conduct cutting-edge research and development in computer vision, machine learning and other related fields
• Work with Research Scientists to deliver advanced technologies to TikTok products

Minimum Qualifications

• Able to commit to working for 12 weeks during Summer 2026
• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
• Strong track record of research in one or more areas of computer vision, computer graphics and machine learning, preferring candidates with publications in top-tier venues such as SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH Asia, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR.
• Highly competent in algorithms and programming.
• Work and collaborate well with team members.
• Ability to work independently.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated software engineering experience from previous internship, work experience, coding competitions, or publications.
• High levels of creativity and quick problem-solving capabilities.