Research Scientist - Seed Multimodal Interaction and World Model - Reinforcement Learning Focus
ByteDance
- Job Type: Full-Time
- Function: Data Science
- Industry: Consumer
- Post Date: 02/14/2026
- Website: bytedance.com
- Company Address: , Beijing, China, 100098
About ByteDance
ByteDance is a global incubator of platforms at the cutting edge of commerce, content, entertainment and enterprise services - over 2.5bn people interact with ByteDance products including TikTok.Job Description
Responsibilities
About Seed Team Established in 2023, the ByteDance Seed team is dedicated to discovering new approaches to general intelligence, and pursuing the edge of intelligence. Our research spans large language models, speech, vision, world models, AI infrastructure, next-generation interfaces and more. With a long-term vision and determination in AI, the ByteDance Seed team remains committed to foundational research. We aim to become a world-class AI research team that drives real technological progress and delivers societal benefits. With labs across China, Singapore, and the U.S., our team has already released industry-leading general-purpose large models and advanced multimodal capabilities, powering over 50 real-world applications — including Doubao, Coze, and Jimeng. - Design and implement reinforcement learning (RL) training systems for large-scale multimodal foundation models - Develop unified modeling frameworks that integrate video, audio, and language, with a focus on visual latent reasoning - Explore Reinforcement Learning-based approaches to bridge understanding and generation for multimodal visual reasoning - Collaborate with researchers to evaluate models on tasks involving world modeling, reasoning, and instruction-conditioned generation
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications: - Master or PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline - Publications in top-tier venues, such as CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, or other leading conferences in AI and ML - Strong research background in at least one of the following: reinforcement learning, multimodal learning, video understanding, or vision-language modeling Preferred Qualifications: - Experience with reinforcement learning in multimodal or interactive environments - Familiarity with video generation or diffusion-based generative models - Experience with large-scale model training (e.g., distributed training, curriculum learning, or memory-augmented transformers) - Solid programming and engineering skills, with experience building training or evaluation pipelines for ML models
Job Information
ã€For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $187040 - $438000 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​
3. Exercising sound judgment.​
About Us
Founded in 2012, ByteDance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, ByteDance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.​
Why Join ByteDance
Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are 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 enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.​
As ByteDancers, we strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. 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​
ByteDance 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 ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. 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.​
Reasonable Accommodation
ByteDance 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