Research Scientist Intern – TikTok Search / Generative AI (LLM) - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)

Job description

About the team The TikTok Search team is responsible for delivering a world-class search experience across TikTok’s global ecosystem. Our mission is to connect users with the most relevant and high-quality content through advanced technologies in search ranking, recommendation, and multimodal understanding. As a campus hire, you will collaborate with top engineers and researchers to solve challenging problems at scale, working across the full stack of search—from content understanding and retrieval to ranking and user experience optimization. Project Overview, Challenges & Value: With the rapid evolution of pre-trained large models, TikTok Search is advancing toward a new paradigm of AI-native search. Traditional search systems face increasing limitations when handling massive-scale data, multimodal content (video, text, image), and complex user intents. This project focuses on building a next-generation generative search system powered by large models to significantly enhance search intelligence and user experience. Key focus areas include: - Integrating large models with ranking systems to improve personalization and relevance. - Developing end-to-end generative search models bas...