TikTok
Senior Research Scientist, Foundation Model (LLM/ VLLM), TikTok - Trust and Safe
TikTok, San Jose, California, United States, 95199
Senior Research Scientist, Foundation Model (LLM/ VLLM), TikTok - Trust and Safety
Location: Mountain View, CA
Overview TikTok is seeking a Senior Research Scientist to advance foundation models (LLM/VLLM) for safety tasks across modalities. The Trust and Safety R&D team builds models and systems to identify and defend against internet abuse and fraud, protecting billions of users and publishers globally. The role involves designing and deploying state-of-the-art models and working with a team of research scientists and ML engineers to scale solutions across TikTok’s platform.
Responsibilities
Lead the design, training, and deployment of foundation models, including LLM/VLM, to support a broad range of content safety tasks across modalities. Build general-purpose foundation models with centralized compute and scalable architecture, aimed at improving risk detection, compliance understanding, and moderation automation.
Tackle multilingual, multimodal, and low-resource challenges by enhancing models’ zero-shot and few-shot generalization across diverse safety domains.
Design and maintain a multimodal safety annotation framework, supporting high-quality training data and evaluation signals for image and video understanding tasks. Explore and implement RLHF strategies to align models with evolving safety policies and user intent.
Collaborate with infra, data, and platform teams to optimize large-scale training pipelines, improve model serving efficiency, and leverage centralized GPU resources effectively.
Partner with product, policy, and recommendation teams to integrate safety-oriented models into real-world moderation workflows and continuously optimize for performance and interpretability.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications: Solid experience in traditional machine learning, with over 2 years of research or development experience in large models; passion for technology, and ability to dive deep into coding and debugging.
Strong problem-solving skills in the face of complex challenges, with a proven track record of technical breakthroughs and business impact; clear logic and sharp insight.
Highly responsible, self-driven, with excellent learning and communication abilities; strong interest in staying up-to-date with advances in multimodal large models.
A strong team player, open to exploring new technologies and driving continuous technical evolution.
Preferred Qualifications: Publications in top conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV) or experience in competitive AI challenges.
About TikTok TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. We have global offices including Los Angeles, Singapore, New York, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.
Why Join Us We aim to inspire creativity and bring joy through an innovative product, supported by diverse, global teams. We strive for curiosity, humility, impact, and an "Always Day 1" mindset to achieve meaningful breakthroughs for employees, the company, and users.
Diversity & Inclusion TikTok is committed to an inclusive workplace that values diverse voices and perspectives. We celebrate diversity and strive to reflect the communities we reach.
TikTok Accommodation TikTok provides reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities or other protected statuses. If you need assistance or an accommodation, please contact us at the provided accommodation request link.
Job Information Compensation: The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $187,040 - $359,720 annually. Compensation may vary based on qualifications, skills, competencies, experience, and location. The role may be eligible for bonuses and stock units. Benefits include medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) with company match, paid parental leave, disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, 10 paid holidays, 10 paid sick days, and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated on hire).
The Company reserves the right to modify benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
Note: This posting may include regional policies and local requirements where applicable.
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Overview TikTok is seeking a Senior Research Scientist to advance foundation models (LLM/VLLM) for safety tasks across modalities. The Trust and Safety R&D team builds models and systems to identify and defend against internet abuse and fraud, protecting billions of users and publishers globally. The role involves designing and deploying state-of-the-art models and working with a team of research scientists and ML engineers to scale solutions across TikTok’s platform.
Responsibilities
Lead the design, training, and deployment of foundation models, including LLM/VLM, to support a broad range of content safety tasks across modalities. Build general-purpose foundation models with centralized compute and scalable architecture, aimed at improving risk detection, compliance understanding, and moderation automation.
Tackle multilingual, multimodal, and low-resource challenges by enhancing models’ zero-shot and few-shot generalization across diverse safety domains.
Design and maintain a multimodal safety annotation framework, supporting high-quality training data and evaluation signals for image and video understanding tasks. Explore and implement RLHF strategies to align models with evolving safety policies and user intent.
Collaborate with infra, data, and platform teams to optimize large-scale training pipelines, improve model serving efficiency, and leverage centralized GPU resources effectively.
Partner with product, policy, and recommendation teams to integrate safety-oriented models into real-world moderation workflows and continuously optimize for performance and interpretability.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications: Solid experience in traditional machine learning, with over 2 years of research or development experience in large models; passion for technology, and ability to dive deep into coding and debugging.
Strong problem-solving skills in the face of complex challenges, with a proven track record of technical breakthroughs and business impact; clear logic and sharp insight.
Highly responsible, self-driven, with excellent learning and communication abilities; strong interest in staying up-to-date with advances in multimodal large models.
A strong team player, open to exploring new technologies and driving continuous technical evolution.
Preferred Qualifications: Publications in top conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV) or experience in competitive AI challenges.
About TikTok TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. We have global offices including Los Angeles, Singapore, New York, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.
Why Join Us We aim to inspire creativity and bring joy through an innovative product, supported by diverse, global teams. We strive for curiosity, humility, impact, and an "Always Day 1" mindset to achieve meaningful breakthroughs for employees, the company, and users.
Diversity & Inclusion TikTok is committed to an inclusive workplace that values diverse voices and perspectives. We celebrate diversity and strive to reflect the communities we reach.
TikTok Accommodation TikTok provides reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities or other protected statuses. If you need assistance or an accommodation, please contact us at the provided accommodation request link.
Job Information Compensation: The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $187,040 - $359,720 annually. Compensation may vary based on qualifications, skills, competencies, experience, and location. The role may be eligible for bonuses and stock units. Benefits include medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) with company match, paid parental leave, disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, 10 paid holidays, 10 paid sick days, and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated on hire).
The Company reserves the right to modify benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
Note: This posting may include regional policies and local requirements where applicable.
#J-18808-Ljbffr