What are the responsibilities and job description for the Research Scientist Graduate (Multimodal Interaction and World Model) - 2026 Start (PhD) position at ByteDance?
Responsibilities
About the Team
The Seed Multimodal Interaction and World Model team is dedicated to developing models that boast human-level multimodal understanding and interaction capabilities. The team is working also aspires to advance the exploration and development of multimodal assistant products
We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2026. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at ByteDance.
Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by end of year 2026. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.
Responsibilities
Minimum Qualifications
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $208800 - $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:
Founded in 2023, the ByteDance Doubao (Seed) Team, is dedicated to pioneering advanced AI foundation models. Our goal is to lead in cutting-edge research and drive technological and societal advancements.
With a strong commitment to AI, our research areas span deep learning, reinforcement learning, Language, Vision, Audio, AI Infra and AI Safety. Our team has labs and research positions across China, Singapore, and the US.
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
About the Team
The Seed Multimodal Interaction and World Model team is dedicated to developing models that boast human-level multimodal understanding and interaction capabilities. The team is working also aspires to advance the exploration and development of multimodal assistant products
We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2026. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at ByteDance.
Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by end of year 2026. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.
Responsibilities
- Drive research and engineering to advance models that enhance understanding of multimodal data and enlarge reasoning capabilities.
- Explore research ideas that optimize both the model's performance and efficiency.
- Establish scaling laws, design and conduct systematic ablations that result in transferrable conclusions.
Minimum Qualifications
- Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline
- Publications in 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
- Expertise in Transformers (Dense and MoE) and familiar with how to scale Transformers on GPUs or TPUs.
- Rich hands-on experience in PyTorch/JAX and distributed training framework.
- Familiar with state-of-the-art techniques for preparing multimodal training data.
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $208800 - $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:
- 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.
Founded in 2023, the ByteDance Doubao (Seed) Team, is dedicated to pioneering advanced AI foundation models. Our goal is to lead in cutting-edge research and drive technological and societal advancements.
With a strong commitment to AI, our research areas span deep learning, reinforcement learning, Language, Vision, Audio, AI Infra and AI Safety. Our team has labs and research positions across China, Singapore, and the US.
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
Salary : $208,800 - $438,000