Graduate ML Engineer - Generative Recs at Scale

TikTok; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 154,000 - 301,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok in Seattle is hiring for a PhD-level AI/ML researcher to join the Global E-Commerce content recommendation team. You will push scale of LLM-based models, explore generative retrieval, and apply advanced optimization across distributed systems. Successful candidates will publish and contribute to open research, with onboarding by year-end.

We value deep expertise in LLMs, NLP, and large-scale ML, and expect ability to work across research and deployment to influence product at scale.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent in CS/AI or related field.
• Strong ML and engineering fundamentals with executable code.
• Experience with LLMs / NLP / CV / RL / recommendation or search.
• Genuine enthusiasm for production-ready LLM/LRM techniques.
• Strong problem definition and decomposition in ambiguous problems.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to scale of LLM-based recommendation models.
• Develop one-stage generative retrieval and multi-task training.
• Apply agent-based models and automated tooling for experimentation.
• Publish open research and collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Skills

PhD in CS/AI

ML fundamentals

LLMs/NLP/CV/RL

Problem solving

LLM enthusiasm

Education

PhD in CS/AI

Tools

CUDA/Triton kernels

Distributed training infra

Inference optimization

Job description

TikTok in Seattle is hiring for a PhD-level AI/ML researcher to join the Global E-Commerce content recommendation team. You will push scale of LLM-based models, explore generative retrieval, and apply advanced optimization across distributed systems. Successful candidates will publish and contribute to open research, with onboarding by year-end.

We value deep expertise in LLMs, NLP, and large-scale ML, and expect ability to work across research and deployment to influence product at scale.