Research Scientist, Video Generation (Intelligent Creation)

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2027. As a graduate, you will have the opportunity to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock your full potential. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at our Company. Successful candidates must be able to onboard by the end of 2027. Please clearly state your availability and expected graduation date in your resume.

About the Team The Intelligent Creation - Global GenAI team focuses on applied research in Generative AI, and delivers intelligent solutions to TikTok, enabling users to make and share creative content in a much easier way. The team has research groups dedicated to multimodal foundation models for content creation, image/video generation and editing, efficient modeling, and world models.

Topic Content: With rapid advances in AGI and foundation models, multimodal content creation across text, image, and especially video is undergoing a fundamental transformation. This role focuses on building next-generation multimodal and agentic foundation models that enable intelligent, efficient, and end-to-end creative workflows, with a strong emphasis on video generation technologies.

You will work on cutting-edge video generation and editing, and agentic systems, optimizing models through large-scale training and post-training (e.g., SFT, RL). The role also involves designing efficient model architectures and advancing reinforcement learning techniques to improve model capability, scalability, and real-world performance in video and broader creation scenarios.

Responsibilities

• Conduct research and development in generative AI and multimodal models, with a primary focus on video generation.
• Design and build models for creative applications on the TikTok platform, driving end-to-end impact from research to production through cross-functional collaboration.
• Explore new AI-driven product opportunities and contribute to next-generation creative experiences.

Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline

• Proficiency in training generative AI or large models using frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Strong programming skills and solid fundamentals in machine learning., Strong problem-solving ability and motivation to tackle real-world challenges.
• Good communication and collaboration skills in fast-paced environments.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Ph.D. in Generative AI, Machine Learning Systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Strong research background in one or more areas: generative AI, video generation, VLMs, or ML systems.
• Hands-on experience in at least one of the following areas: Video generation and editing (highly preferred); VLM fine-tuning; Efficient model design and optimization; Reinforcement learning methods (e.g., RLHF, DPO, GRPO).
• Track record of research publications in top-tier conferences such as CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGGRAPH, or SIGGRAPH Asia.

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $254400 - $588000 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