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Research Scientist (Trust and Safety - Vision Language Models/VLM)

San Jose, United States of America💼 Full-time🗓 2026-09-28

Core

Researching and enhancing Vision Language Models (VLMs) with specialized features like OCR and captioning to optimize performance for TikTok business applications including content moderation, search, and recommendations.

Role type

Research Scientist (Trust and Safety - Vision Language Models/VLM)

Builds

Foundation models (LLM, VLM, Omni Models) and downstream business applications for TikTok

Domain

Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models, Vision Language Models, Trust and Safety

Deliverable

production ML models

Required skills

VLM pretraining and applications, multi-modality LLM/VLM expertise, reinforcement learning based alignment, efficient training and inference, model architecture design, OCR and captioning implementation, cross-functional project planning

Preferred skills

Inference tuning and acceleration, GPU/AI accelerator expertise, distributed computing framework tuning, PEFT, RL, MoE, CoT, Langchain, published research papers

Technologies

Python, Rust, C++, PyTorch, DeepSpeed, Megatron, vLLM, PEFT, Langchain

Responsibilities

Enhance VLM with specialized features like OCR and captioning, Explore model architecture and inference-efficient design, Work with cross-functional teams to implement VLM projects, Extend insights from industry to academia

Seniority

PhD level Research Scientist

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