What are the responsibilities and job description for the Student Researcher [Seed LLM - Scientific Coding Agent (LLMs × Physics/Chemistry; RL preferred)] – 2026 Start (PhD) position at ByteDance?
Responsibilities
About the team
The Seed LLM Code Generation Team is dedicated to comprehensively enhancing the model's coding capabilities and building a bridge for AI to interact with the digital world. Currently, the team focuses on key technologies such as large-scale automated synthesis of coding competitions/engineering problems, reinforcement learning for code agents, and construction of high-quality code pre-training datasets.
We’re building a Scientific Coding Agent—an LLM-driven system that plans, writes, debugs, and executes scientific code to accelerate physics/chemistry/Biology research. As a Research Intern, you’ll help define how we evaluate scientific coding agents and explore agent evolution mechanisms that enable new scientific discoveries.
PhD internships at ByteDance provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early. Please state your availability clearly in your resume (Start date, End date).
Responsibilities
Minimum Qualifications:
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $65- $65.
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 first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of 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:
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 LLM Code Generation Team is dedicated to comprehensively enhancing the model's coding capabilities and building a bridge for AI to interact with the digital world. Currently, the team focuses on key technologies such as large-scale automated synthesis of coding competitions/engineering problems, reinforcement learning for code agents, and construction of high-quality code pre-training datasets.
We’re building a Scientific Coding Agent—an LLM-driven system that plans, writes, debugs, and executes scientific code to accelerate physics/chemistry/Biology research. As a Research Intern, you’ll help define how we evaluate scientific coding agents and explore agent evolution mechanisms that enable new scientific discoveries.
PhD internships at ByteDance provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early. Please state your availability clearly in your resume (Start date, End date).
Responsibilities
- Benchmarking for scientific coding (core)
- Design a principled benchmark suite spanning tasks with literature-grounded coding and issues solving for existing codebase.
- Curate tasks/datasets and write robust unit tests with compliance of scientific knowledge.
- Implement evaluation metrics and build a clean, extensible evaluation pipeline with baselines.
- Language evolution for new scientific discovery (core)
- Prototype loops where agents propose/refine scientific language and tie these to executable code & simulations.
- Build workflows (multi-agents, planning, tool-use, self‑critique), integrate code execution sandboxes, retrieval, and experiment runners.
- Compare LLMs and inference strategies; run ablations and produce clean research artifacts (plots, tables, write-ups).
Minimum Qualifications:
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming Systems, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Applied Math, or related field.
- Strong Python and software engineering: Git, testing (pytest), packaging, comfort with Linux/containers.
- Working knowledge of LLMs (prompting, fine‑tuning or adapters, evaluation) and at least one ML framework (eg. PyTorch).
- Solid foundations in physics and/or chemistry (e.g., classical/quantum/thermo/stat mech; physical chemistry, molecular modeling) and numerical methods (ODE/PDE, optimization, linear algebra).
- Reinforcement Learning (PPO/DPO, reward modeling, curriculum learning).
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Hourly) - Campus Intern
The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $65- $65.
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 first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of 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.
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