Generative ML Engineer – E‑Commerce Recommendations

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 128,000 - 317,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Paid holidays

Job summary

TikTok Inc. in San Jose, CA is seeking a Graduate Research Engineer to join the E-commerce Recommendation Team and advance generative and LLM-based recommender research, delivering personalized shopping experiences for TikTok users.

You will work on generative retrieval, RL, and agentic systems to optimize performance and user experience, collaborating with ML, data, and product teams. A CS/EE/Math/Stats degree and strong Python plus DL framework skills are required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or related field.
• Strong foundation in ML/DL with experience in LLMs, RL, generative models, or recommender systems.
• Proficient in Python and at least one DL framework (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX).

Responsibilities

• Drive generative recommendation research: evolve recommender systems from discriminative to generative paradigms and optimize training/inference on GPUs.
• Apply LLMs, RL, and related techniques to improve semantic understanding and reasoning in recommender systems for e-commerce scenarios.
• Explore agentic recommendation research: build self-evolving agents for real-time, personalized decisions and adjustments.
• Model long-term value and user experience to enable sustainable growth of the platform.

Skills

Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

Research Experience

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/EE/Math/Stats

Tools

LLM frameworks

Job description

TikTok Inc. in San Jose, CA is seeking a Graduate Research Engineer to join the E-commerce Recommendation Team and advance generative and LLM-based recommender research, delivering personalized shopping experiences for TikTok users.

You will work on generative retrieval, RL, and agentic systems to optimize performance and user experience, collaborating with ML, data, and product teams. A CS/EE/Math/Stats degree and strong Python plus DL framework skills are required.