[Remote] Student Researcher [LLM Post Training – Agent & Reinforcement Learning] - 2026 Start (PhD)

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. ByteDance is dedicated to pioneering advanced AI foundation models and is seeking a Student Researcher for their Seed LLM Post Training team. The role involves researching and developing advanced technologies in reinforcement learning and agent capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Develop generalized agents capable of solving complex real-world tasks through long-horizon reasoning, memory, and multi-turn interaction
• Tackle the challenges of large-scale reinforcement learning, building systems that can scale across compute, data, and environments to improve model intelligence and alignment with human preferences
• Advance agent capabilities in long-horizon, multi-step reasoning across diverse domains, aiming to match or surpass expert-level performance
• Explore planning, tool use, and feedback mechanisms to enhance agent robustness and adaptability across domains

Skills

• 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 top-tier ML/AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML)
• Solid programming and experimentation skills, including with RL or LLM frameworks
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment
• 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

Benefits

• Interns have day one access to health insurance
• Life insurance
• Wellbeing benefits and more
• Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year
• 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

Company Overview

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