LLM Post-training Engineer Intern (Research & Product) - 2027 Summer

About the team The Multimedia AI team at TikTok focuses on building, researching, and applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to power our global products. We believe the most impactful problems in AI arise at the intersection of research and real-world deployment-and post-training is where that intersection is sharpest.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship. Our internship program offers students hands-on experience, industry exposure, and opportunities to apply their knowledge to real-world challenges while building a strong foundation for personal and professional growth. Interns will gain practical experience, explore potential career paths, and participate in social events, learning programs, and development workshops alongside industry professionals. Candidates may apply to a maximum of two positions across Our Company and its affiliates globally. Applications will be considered in the order they are submitted. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Please clearly state your availability in your resume, including your start and end dates.

Responsibilities

• Support the development and optimization of post-training strategies, including instruction tuning, preference tuning (SFT/DPO/PPO), and model alignment.
• Assist in building robust evaluation pipelines to measure model performance, helpfulness, and safety across diverse multimedia product use cases.
• Participate in the research and implementation of cutting-edge methodologies in reward modeling and human preference learning.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to bridge the gap between experimental research and production-ready AI applications (e.g., video understanding, translation, and content classification).
• Analyze and process large-scale datasets to identify patterns that improve model behavior and alignment quality. Minimum Qualifications:
• Currently pursuing an Undergraduate or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical discipline.
• Strong programming skills in Python and experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Foundational understanding of Transformer architectures and LLM training principles.
• Demonstrated ability to learn quickly in a fast-paced environment and a strong passion for AI "landing" and product application.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Previous experience or research projects involving LLM fine-tuning, RLHF, or synthetic data generation.
• Familiarity with distributed training tools (e.g., DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM).
• Experience or interest in multimodal AI (integrating text with video or audio).
• Proven track record of building and deploying AI projects, either through previous internships, open-source contributions, or academic research.

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