Foundation ML Engineer – Generative E-Commerce Recommendations

TikTok; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 162,000 - 388,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Disability coverage

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

High holidays and PTO

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a PhD-level researcher to join the Recommendation Foundation team in San Jose, focusing on event-sequence-driven generative recommendation and multimodal understanding. The role emphasizes both research and engineering practice with opportunities to publish and contribute to cutting-edge models.

You will collaborate across teams to advance retrieval, ranking, and end-to-end generative recommendations, working within a dynamic, growth-focused environment that values curiosity

Qualifications

• PhD or near-completion in a related field with strong ML background.
• Proficiency in Python and DL frameworks like PyTorch.
• Strong research mindset and solid engineering skills.

Responsibilities

• Participate in the full training lifecycle of Recommendation Foundation Models (pre-, mid-, post-training).
• Design and train multimodal tokenizers for recommendation items using foundation models.
• Develop LLM-native recommendation by integrating tasks into language model training.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Machine learning

Deep learning

Research mindset

Education

PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or related

Job description

TikTok is seeking a PhD-level researcher to join the Recommendation Foundation team in San Jose, focusing on event-sequence-driven generative recommendation and multimodal understanding. The role emphasizes both research and engineering practice with opportunities to publish and contribute to cutting-edge models.

You will collaborate across teams to advance retrieval, ranking, and end-to-end generative recommendations, working within a dynamic, growth-focused environment that values curiosity