Associate Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendations

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 123,000 - 259,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is hiring applied ML engineers and data scientists to advance feed and e-commerce recommendations. You will design and maintain MLOps pipelines for hyper-scale users, architect real-time data pipelines, and optimize CTR/CVR models for production with latency-aware techniques.

You will collaborate with researchers and platform teams to transition experiments into zero-downtime deployments while ensuring robust monitoring and observability of system performance.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related fields.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• Understanding of MLOps principles, including Docker, model tracking, and workflows.
• Driven to solve complex distributed systems and ML operations challenges.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain robust MLOps pipelines for large-scale recommender models with CI/CD.
• Architect high-throughput real-time streaming data pipelines and feature stores for dynamic modeling.
• Optimize candidate generation and ranking models for production, including latency reduction with CI/CD and hardware acceleration.
• Build automated monitoring, debugging, and visualization tools for model health, data drift, and resource usage.
• Collaborate with researchers and platform teams to deploy production-scale deep learning models with minimal downtime.

Skills

Programming

Problem solving

MLOps basics

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related fields

Tools

Docker

CUDA

TensorRT

Job description

Responsibilities

About the team

We are a group of applied machine learning engineers and data scientists that focus on general feed recommendations and E-commerce recommendations. We are developing innovative algorithms and techniques to improve user engagement and satisfaction, converting creative ideas into business-impacting solutions. We are interested and excited in applying large scale machine learning to solve various real-world problems.

What you will do

• Participate in designing, building, and maintaining robust MLOps pipelines (CI/CD for ML) for hyper-scale (10M–100M+ users) recommendation models, ensuring reliable continuous training, automated evaluation, and seamless deployment.
• Architect high-throughput real-time streaming data pipelines and feature stores (offline & online feature synchronization) to support dynamic user interest modeling (short-term & long-term signals).
• Optimize candidate generation and ranking predictive models (CTR, CVR) for production serving. Work on inference acceleration, model quantization, parallel computation, and latency reduction using C++/CUDA/TensorRT or similar frameworks.
• Build automated monitoring, debugging, and visualization tools for tracking feature drift, model performance degradation, data leakage, and GPU/CPU cluster utilization.
• Partner with algorithm researchers and platform teams to streamline the lifecycle of large-scale deep learning models from experimental prototype to zero-downtime production deployment.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related fields.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• Basic understanding of MLOps principles, including data preprocessing, containerization (Docker), model tracking/versioning, or workflow orchestration.
• Driven to solve complex real-world distributed systems and machine learning operational challenges.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.

About USDS

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision‑making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.

On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision‑making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in‑person schedule up to 5 days a week.

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.

USDS Reasonable Accommodation

USDS 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/USDS-RA

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $122574 - $259200 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

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:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems;
3. Exercising sound judgment.