Graduate ML Engineer: Generative Recommender & Multimodal

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Short-term and long-term disability

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

10 paid holidays

10 paid sick days

17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorata

Job summary

TikTok Inc. in San Jose, California, is seeking to join the Recommendation Foundation team within Data - Global E-commerce to explore event-sequence-driven generative recommendation.

The role integrates large language models, vision-language models, multimodal understanding, reinforcement learning, and system optimization to push beyond click prediction toward general-purpose recommendation agents. As a graduate, you will have opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or a related discipline.
• Solid foundation in machine learning and deep learning, with strong interest in LLMs and generative recommendation.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with deep learning frameworks such as 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, leveraging multimodal foundation models to encode rich item content into discrete semantic tokens and raise the performance ceiling of Recommendation Foundation Models.
• Develop LLM-native recommendation by incorporating recommendation tasks directly into large language model training and leveraging world knowledge to improve recommendation quality.
• Build the next generation of recommendation systems powered by Recommendation Foundation Models, spanning retrieval, ranking, and end-to-end generative recommendation.

Skills

Bachelor's degree

ML/DL fundamentals

Python

PyTorch

Research mindset

Self-driven

Education

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

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

TikTok Inc. in San Jose, California, is seeking to join the Recommendation Foundation team within Data - Global E-commerce to explore event-sequence-driven generative recommendation.

The role integrates large language models, vision-language models, multimodal understanding, reinforcement learning, and system optimization to push beyond click prediction toward general-purpose recommendation agents. As a graduate, you will have opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and