Student Researcher (LLM Post Training –… at ByteDance · San Jose

Summary: ByteDance is a technology company developing advanced artificial intelligence and multimodal foundation models. The Student Researcher will research LLM post-training technologies involving agents and reinforcement learning, optimize large-scale models and systems, construct data, perform instruction tuning and preference alignment, and improve reasoning, coding, mathematical, and other model capabilities.

Responsibilities:
- Explore large-scale models and optimize systems
- Data construction, instruction tuning, preference alignment, and model optimization
- Improving relevant model capabilities, such as reasoning, code, math etc
- In-depth research and exploration of future use cases

Required Qualifications:
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, AI, or a related field
- Research experience in reinforcement learning, sequential decision-making, or agent behavior
- First-author publications in accredited ML/AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML)
- Solid programming and experimentation skills, including with RL or LLM frameworks
- As a condition of employment, all successful candidates must be able to establish authorization to work in the United States

Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with LLM agents, tool use, or prompt-based control
- Familiarity with environments such as WebArena, ALFWorld, or programmatic reasoning tasks
- Understanding of RL techniques such as reward shaping, memory augmentation, or curriculum learning

Required Skills: Reinforcement Learning, Sequential Decision-Making, Agent Behavior, Large Language Models (LLMs), Programming and Experimentation, LLM Agents, Prompt-Based Control, Reward Shaping, Memory Augmentation, Curriculum Learning, RL/LLM Frameworks

Internship Start Date: Start in 2026

Benefits: 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.