Research Scientist Intern (TikTok-Neural Graphics and World Models) - 2027 Start (PhD)

• Study relevant research, reproduce strong baselines, and identify practical extensions.
• Develop and evaluate models, algorithms, data methods, or evaluation methods in a scoped research area.
• Build components of training, inference, data, or evaluation workflows using modern ML frameworks.
• Run controlled experiments, analyze model behavior, and communicate findings clearly.
• Create research prototypes for interactive graphics, creative tools, or engine-based workflows.
• Produce reproducible research artifacts, clear documentation, demonstrations, and technical reports.

• Currently pursuing a PhD degree in a relevant technical field.
• Able to commit to working for 12 weeks during the Summer of 2027.
• Research experience through a laboratory, thesis, publication, internship, open-source project, or substantial independent project. Strong, up-to-date foundation in machine learning, generative modeling, and experimental methodology, with hands-on experience building, training, fine-tuning, or evaluating models using frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Familiarity with modern generative architectures and training methods such as variational autoencoders, latent tokenizers, diffusion or flow-matching models, diffusion transformers, autoregressive models, multimodal transformers, long-context modeling, pre-training, or post-training.
• Engineering fluency with model development workflows and the ability to reason about model architecture, training dynamics, data quality, and evaluation results.
• Deep experience in at least one of the following AI-for-graphics areas: 3D modeling, asset generation, or 3D representations; animation or motion generation; simulation or physics-aware learning; rendering or neural rendering; world models or video prediction; or graphics and game-engine workflows.

• Peer-reviewed publications at leading venues such as SIGGRAPH, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, RSS, CoRL, or related research communities.
• Strong technical reports, open-source contributions, demos, project pages, or research projects that show technical depth, originality, and independent experimentation.
• Experience with 3D or world generation conditioned on text, images, video, actions, or structured scene inputs.
• Interest in collaborating with Software Engineers to move research prototypes into interactive engine pipelines.
• Ability to understand recent research, design controlled experiments, analyze failures, and contribute to model training, data, or evaluation workflows.

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As a condition of employment, all successful candidates must be able to establish authorization to work in the United States. For this position, the Company does not provide sponsorship or any immigration-related benefits.