ByteDance

Research Scientist - Driven Agent Self-Evolution - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)

ByteDance  •  $202k - $368k/yr  •  Seattle, WA (Onsite)  •  19 days ago
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Job Description

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2027. 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 our Company.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by end of year 2027. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Team Introduction:
The Applied Machine Learning Enterprise team combines system engineering and machine learning to develop and operate Large Language Model (LLM) service platforms that offer businesses Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) solutions, serving both large model providers and downstream users. The US team drives the design, development, and operation of MaaS solutions across the US and international markets outside mainland China. We are building full-stack, end-to-end solutions spanning text and multimodal LLM algorithms, LLM training/fine-tuning/inference frameworks, prompt engineering, model alignment, and intelligent agent systems. Beyond model serving, we operate large-scale log analytics pipelines that process massive volumes of invocation logs from text models, multimodal models, and agent systems — extracting usage patterns, quality signals, and actionable insights to inform model improvement, system optimization, and product decisions through continuous, data-driven feedback loops. We are actively seeking talented engineers and researchers specializing in Large Language Models and AI Agent systems to join our dynamic team.

Topic Content:
As model capabilities improve and computation becomes cheaper, the key challenge in real-world deployment is no longer building a capable one-off assistant, but building agent systems that improve through use. This research studies a self-evolving agent framework in which execution traces, environmental responses, and human feedback are converted into signals for continual improvement. The goal is to establish a closed loop from execution to feedback, attribution, accumulation, and reuse, so that system capability grows with real-world interaction. We focus on three tightly coupled directions: adaptive runtime, which enables online adjustment of planning, tool use, and control policies; experience compilation, which abstracts reusable skills, rules, and failure patterns from trajectories; and evaluation-governance loops, which ensure that each system update is measurable, comparable, and reversible. Together, these components support a synergistic co-evolution of the model layer and the harness layer, improving task quality, reducing manual intervention, and accumulating durable capability over time. More broadly, this work reframes agent deployment as a continual learning systems problem: not how to build a stronger static agent, but how to build an operational system that learns reliably from experience.

Responsibilities:
- Research and develop agent frameworks that continuously learn and improve from execution traces, user feedback, and environmental signals.
- Build large-scale log analytics pipelines to extract quality signals, usage patterns, and actionable insights from model and agent invocation logs, driving data-informed system and model improvements.
- Explore and apply frontier techniques in LLM post-training, reasoning, and planning to enhance agent capabilities.
- Collaborate across algorithm research, platform engineering, and product teams to turn research ideas into production-grade systems at scale.

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $202160 - $368220 annually.
ByteDance

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.

Creation is the core of ByteDance's purpose. Our products are built to help imaginations thrive. This is doubly true of the teams that make our innovations possible.

Together, we inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we aim towards achieving every day. At ByteDance, we create together and grow together. That's how we drive impact - for ourselves, our company, and the users we serve. We are committed to building a safe, healthy and positive online environment for all our users.

We have over 110,000 employees based in more than 30 countries globally. Join us.

Industry
IT & Software
Company Size
10,000+ employees
Headquarters
China, CN
Year Founded
Unknown
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