Recommendation Algorithm Engineer-TikTok Algorithm

TIKTOK PTE. LTD.; Singapore; On-site; SGD 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech company seeks a skilled professional for its R&D team in Singapore. The role focuses on developing state-of-the-art recommendation systems, tackling complex technical challenges, and enhancing user experience with innovative AI solutions. Candidates should hold a doctorate in relevant fields and possess strong programming, analytical, and teamwork skills. Join us to make a global impact through technology and creativity at TikTok!

Qualifications

• Doctorate degree preferred in AI or related fields.
• Familiar with machine learning, NLP, and data mining.
• Strong programming and software design skills.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain innovative recommendation systems.
• Collaborate with experts on cutting-edge technologies.
• Address technical challenges under high quality and security standards.

Skills

Strong programming skills

Problem-solving

Analytical skills

Teamwork

Communication skills

Education

Doctorate in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Mathematics or related field

Job description

About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is 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 bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.

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. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. 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

TikTok 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 TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. 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.

Responsibilities

Team Introduction:

TikTok Research & Development (R&D) Team

The TikTok R&D team is dedicated to building and maintaining industry-leading products that drive the success of TikTok’s global business. By joining us, you'll work on core scenarios such as user growth, social features, live streaming, e-commerce consumer side, content creation, and content consumption, helping our products scale rapidly across global markets. You'll also face deep technical challenges in areas like service architecture and infrastructure engineering, ensuring our systems operate with high quality, efficiency, and security. Meanwhile, our team also provides comprehensive technical solutions across diverse business needs, continuously optimizing product metrics and improving user experience.

Here, you'll collaborate with leading experts in exploring cutting-edge technologies and pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Every line of your code will serve hundreds of millions of users. Our team is professional and goal-oriented, with an egalitarian and easy-going collaborative environment. We welcome you to join us and make a global impact with TikTok!

Research Project Introduction:

As the world's leading short-video platform, TikTok faces multiple challenges in its recommendation systems, including data sparsity for new users leading to insufficient personalisation, high timeliness requirements for live steaming recommendations, difficulty in maintaining user interest diversity, and complex e-commerce recommendation system chains. Traditional recommendation methods heavily rely on historical behaviour modelling, which struggles with the cold-start problem for new users. Live-streaming recommendations demand real-time responsiveness to rapidly changing content dynamics (e.g., host interactions, traffic fluctuations) within extremely short time windows (typically within 30 minutes) posing higher demands on the system's real-time perception and decision-making capabilities.

Additionally, the immersive single-feed format amplifies the challenge of maintaining content diversity, requiring a careful balance between multi-interest learning and the risk of content drift caused by exploratory recommendations. The current e-commerce recommendation system follows a multi-stage funnel architecture (recall–ranking–re-ranking), which often leads to inconsistent chains, high maintenance costs, and an overreliance on short-term value prediction. This leads users to fall into content homogenization fatigue.

To address these pain points, this project proposes leveraging large language models (LLMs) and large model technologies to achieve significant breakthroughs. On one hand, LLMs—with their vast knowledge base and few-shot reasoning capabilities—can infer new users' potential intentions from registration data and external knowledge, thereby alleviating cold-start issues. On the other hand, by integrating graph neural networks (GNNs) and full-lifecycle user behavior sequences for modelling social preferences, we aim to improve the accuracy of interest prediction.

Additionally, the project explores the generalization capabilities, long-context awareness, and end-to-end modelling strengths of large models to simplify the e-commerce recommendation chains, enhance adaptability to real-time changes, and improve exploratory recommendation effectiveness. The ultimate goal is to build a more streamlined system with more accurate recommendations, enhancing user experience and retention while driving sustainable business growth.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Got doctor degree, preferably in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Mathematics, or other related fields.
• Strong programming skills with a good foundation in software design ability and coding practices.
• Outstanding problem-solving and analytical skills, great passion for technology, and strong communication skills and teamwork.
• Familiar with machine learning, natural language processing, and/or data mining. Prior experience in recommendation systems, computational advertising, or search engines is a plus.