Graduate ML Engineer: Generative LLM & Multimodal Models

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 388,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok is building the Recommendation Foundation Models within its Data – Global E-commerce organization, advancing beyond click prediction to general-purpose recommendations. You will contribute to training, modeling, and deploying multimodal systems and LLM-driven strategies in a highly collaborative environment.

As a candidate, you should have a strong ML background, Python proficiency, and experience with PyTorch, plus a research mindset and engineering skills to ship impactful models at

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or related field.
• Strong foundation in machine learning and deep learning, with interest in LLMs/generative recommendation.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with PyTorch.
• Self-driven with a strong research mindset and solid engineering skills.

Responsibilities

• Participate in the full training lifecycle of Recommendation Foundation Models, including pre-training, mid-training, and post-training.
• Design and train multimodal semantic tokenizers for recommendation items using foundation models.
• Develop LLM-native recommendation by integrating tasks into large language model training.
• Build next-gen recommender systems spanning retrieval, ranking, and end-to-end generation.

Skills

Python

Machine Learning

Research mindset

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

TikTok is building the Recommendation Foundation Models within its Data – Global E-commerce organization, advancing beyond click prediction to general-purpose recommendations. You will contribute to training, modeling, and deploying multimodal systems and LLM-driven strategies in a highly collaborative environment.

As a candidate, you should have a strong ML background, Python proficiency, and experience with PyTorch, plus a research mindset and engineering skills to ship impactful models at