CPT Research Scientist Jobs
Research Scientist CPT jobs let F-1 students apply graduate-level research directly in industry labs, national research centers, or university-affiliated programs. Your DSO must authorize CPT before your start date, and the role must connect explicitly to your degree program. Full-time CPT exceeding 12 months eliminates OPT eligibility, so timing matters.
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Get Access To All JobsINTRODUCTION
Research Scientist Intern – TikTok Recommendation (NextGen LLM) - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)
LOCATION
Location: San Jose
EMPLOYMENT TYPE
Employment Type: Intern
JOB CODE
Job Code: A242061
Responsibilities
We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2027. As an intern, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at our Company.
Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding during the summer 2027. Please state your availability clearly in your resume.
About the team
Our team's mission is to empower genAI and content understanding in TikTok businesses. Computer vision and natural language processing are important dimensions in both content generation and understanding. We are working on various foundational models, including multi-modality pretraining, multi-modal large language model, image generation, video generation etc. As a genAI team on the business side, we try to succeed in both achieving business metric gains (recommendation metrics) and also producing state-of-the-art research outputs.
Project Overview, Challenges & Value
We aim to integrate recommendation large models multimodal large models, and the Agentic Rec framework to fundamentally reshape the underlying content distribution logic, empowering the system with deep semantic association and autonomous planning capabilities, exploring new frontiers in algorithmic design.
1. Recommendation Large Models: Address challenges such as gradient convergence and representation drift in ultra-long behavioral sequences, enabling the system to achieve true "logical reasoning" capabilities.
2. Unified Multimodal Semantic Space: Explore alignment across video, image-text content, and user intent, constructing a fully multimodal semantic space that goes beyond text.
3. Agentic Rec: Develop recommendation agents with capabilities such as self-reflection, tool invocation, and long-horizon planning, driving a transformation of recommendation and content distribution experiences.
Key challenges include:
1. Extreme-scale reasoning: Performance gains and bottlenecks associated with ultra-large model parameters and ultra-long sequence modeling.
2. Multimodal fusion: Challenges in representation learning for cross-modal intent alignment.
3. Autonomous evolution: Breakthroughs in long-horizon planning and decision-making paradigms for agent systems.
Project Value:
1. Technical value: Explore new paradigms for recommendation, significantly improving recommendation performance and system efficiency.
2. Business value: Enable deeper understanding of user interests and content, improving distribution efficiency and enhancing satisfaction for both users and creators.
Responsibilities:
- Design and develop next-generation large-scale recommendation systems optimized for personalized, engaging, and scalable user experiences.
- Leverage state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning techniques, including large model technologies (LLM and MLLM, etc.), to enhance recommendation performance and accuracy.
- Collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams, including infrastructure engineers, PMO, and researchers, to create advanced systems that improve recommendation relevance, diversity, and user engagement.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
-
Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related field.
-
Experience in one or more areas of computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning.
-
Solid knowledge and experience with at least one major deep learning framework (e.g. PyTorch, Tensorflow, MXNet, Caffe/Caffe2).
-
Familiar with deep neural network architectures such as transformer/SSM/CNN/RNN/LSTM etc.
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills. Ability to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Research experience demonstrated through projects, publications, or open-source contributions.
- Authors with publications in top-tier venues such as SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR.
COMPENSATION
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60 - $60.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Interns have day one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, and more. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in the first half of the year, 40 if hired in the second half of the year). Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing allowance.
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:
-
Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
-
Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
-
Exercising sound judgment.
ABOUT TIKTOK
TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.
WHY JOIN US
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity, and bring joy – a mission we work towards every day.
We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make an impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
TIKTOK ACCOMMODATION
TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs, or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at
https://tinyurl.com/RA-request
INTRODUCTION
Research Scientist Intern – TikTok Recommendation (NextGen LLM) - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)
LOCATION
Location: San Jose
EMPLOYMENT TYPE
Employment Type: Intern
JOB CODE
Job Code: A242061
Responsibilities
We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2027. As an intern, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at our Company.
Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding during the summer 2027. Please state your availability clearly in your resume.
About the team
Our team's mission is to empower genAI and content understanding in TikTok businesses. Computer vision and natural language processing are important dimensions in both content generation and understanding. We are working on various foundational models, including multi-modality pretraining, multi-modal large language model, image generation, video generation etc. As a genAI team on the business side, we try to succeed in both achieving business metric gains (recommendation metrics) and also producing state-of-the-art research outputs.
Project Overview, Challenges & Value
We aim to integrate recommendation large models multimodal large models, and the Agentic Rec framework to fundamentally reshape the underlying content distribution logic, empowering the system with deep semantic association and autonomous planning capabilities, exploring new frontiers in algorithmic design.
1. Recommendation Large Models: Address challenges such as gradient convergence and representation drift in ultra-long behavioral sequences, enabling the system to achieve true "logical reasoning" capabilities.
2. Unified Multimodal Semantic Space: Explore alignment across video, image-text content, and user intent, constructing a fully multimodal semantic space that goes beyond text.
3. Agentic Rec: Develop recommendation agents with capabilities such as self-reflection, tool invocation, and long-horizon planning, driving a transformation of recommendation and content distribution experiences.
Key challenges include:
1. Extreme-scale reasoning: Performance gains and bottlenecks associated with ultra-large model parameters and ultra-long sequence modeling.
2. Multimodal fusion: Challenges in representation learning for cross-modal intent alignment.
3. Autonomous evolution: Breakthroughs in long-horizon planning and decision-making paradigms for agent systems.
Project Value:
1. Technical value: Explore new paradigms for recommendation, significantly improving recommendation performance and system efficiency.
2. Business value: Enable deeper understanding of user interests and content, improving distribution efficiency and enhancing satisfaction for both users and creators.
Responsibilities:
- Design and develop next-generation large-scale recommendation systems optimized for personalized, engaging, and scalable user experiences.
- Leverage state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning techniques, including large model technologies (LLM and MLLM, etc.), to enhance recommendation performance and accuracy.
- Collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams, including infrastructure engineers, PMO, and researchers, to create advanced systems that improve recommendation relevance, diversity, and user engagement.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
-
Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related field.
-
Experience in one or more areas of computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning.
-
Solid knowledge and experience with at least one major deep learning framework (e.g. PyTorch, Tensorflow, MXNet, Caffe/Caffe2).
-
Familiar with deep neural network architectures such as transformer/SSM/CNN/RNN/LSTM etc.
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills. Ability to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Research experience demonstrated through projects, publications, or open-source contributions.
- Authors with publications in top-tier venues such as SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR.
COMPENSATION
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60 - $60.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Interns have day one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, and more. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in the first half of the year, 40 if hired in the second half of the year). Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing allowance.
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:
-
Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
-
Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
-
Exercising sound judgment.
ABOUT TIKTOK
TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.
WHY JOIN US
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity, and bring joy – a mission we work towards every day.
We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make an impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
TIKTOK ACCOMMODATION
TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs, or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at
https://tinyurl.com/RA-request
See all 33+ CPT Research Scientist Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new CPT Research Scientist Jobs.
Get Access To All JobsResearch Scientist CPT: Frequently Asked Questions
Does a Research Scientist role qualify for CPT authorization?
Yes, if the research work is an integral part of your established curriculum and your school offers academic credit or requires the experience for your degree program. Your DSO will evaluate whether the specific research domain maps to your coursework. Positions in unrelated fields, even if titled 'Research Scientist,' won't qualify.
Can I do full-time CPT as a Research Scientist without losing OPT eligibility?
You can do full-time CPT, but any combination of full-time CPT totaling 12 months or more across your entire F-1 program eliminates your OPT eligibility, per USCIS rules. Part-time CPT, defined as 20 hours per week or fewer, does not count toward that limit regardless of duration.
How do I find Research Scientist employers experienced with CPT and F-1 hiring?
Browse Research Scientist listings on Migrate Mate, which surfaces employers with documented work authorization filing history. National labs, university-affiliated research institutes, and large biotech or tech companies typically have dedicated immigration teams and HR processes for F-1 students on CPT.
What documents does a Research Scientist employer need from me for CPT?
Your employer needs a copy of your updated I-20 showing the CPT authorization, including the employer name, authorized start and end dates, and whether authorization is part-time or full-time. Some employers also request your valid F-1 visa stamp and I-94 arrival record. Provide these before your start date, not after.
Does CPT work as a Research Scientist count toward H-1B specialty occupation experience?
Yes, legitimate CPT employment generates W-2 income and builds verifiable work history in a specialty occupation, which can support an H-1B visa petition later. Your employer should issue a standard W-2 for CPT employment. Keep your offer letter, I-20 with CPT authorization, and any performance documentation in case USCIS requests evidence of prior qualifying experience.