Machine Learning Engineer, E-commerce Feed Recommendation

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

Job summary

TikTok Inc. in Seattle is seeking a highly skilled ML Engineer to advance our e-commerce recommendation engine for TikTok Shop. You will help connect user interests with top sellers through live-streaming and short videos, driving personalized shopping experiences.

Join a team of researchers and engineers applying large-scale ML to optimize candidate generation, ranking, and user engagement. Strong programming and ML background required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related fields.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• 1 year of experience in applied machine learning.
• Experience with deep learning tools such as TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Experience with C++ or Python or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Participate in building large-scale live-streaming and short video e-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems on TikTok.
• Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking, including real-time data pipelines, feature engineering, model optimization and innovation.
• Build long and short term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of various data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently.
• Design and develop various strategies using ML technology to improve user shopping experience, and resolve e-commerce business challenges, such as the cold start problem and traffic allocation.
• Design and build supporting/debugging tools as needed.

Skills

Programming & problem-solving

Applied ML experience

Deep Learning Tools

C++/Python

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Job description

Responsibilities

Interest-based E-commerce is a new and fast growing business that aims at connecting all customers' interests to excellent sellers and high quality products on TikTok Shop. Different from other traditional E-commerce platforms, TikTok Shop provides customers with personalized and unique shopping experience through E-commerce live-streaming and E-commerce short videos. The recommendation system plays an extremely important role in helping customers explore their shopping interests.

We are a group of applied machine learning engineers and research scientists that focus on E-commerce video/live-streaming recommendations on the major traffic source of TikTok ForU page, where we serve traffic for billions of users every single day. We develop innovative algorithms and ML techniques to improve user engagement and satisfaction, converting creative ideas into business-impacting solutions. We are interested and excited about applying large scale machine learning to solve various real-world problems in E-commerce and recommendation.

• Participate in building large-scale (10 million to 100 million) live-streaming and short video e-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems on TikTok.
• Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking(eg. Click Through Rate and Conversion Rate prediction) , including, but not limited to building real-time data pipelines, feature engineering, model optimization and innovation.
• Build long and short term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of various data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently.
• Design and develop various strategies using ML technology to improve user shopping experience, and resolve e-commerce business challenges, such as the cold start problem and traffic allocation.
• Design and build supporting/debugging tools as needed.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related fields.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• 1 year of experience in applied machine learning, familiar with one or more of the algorithms such as Collaborative Filtering, Matrix Factorization, Factorization Machines, Word2vec, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting Trees, Deep Neural Networks, Wide and Deep etc.
• Experience in Deep Learning Tools such as tensorflow/pytorch.
• Experience with at least one programming language like C++/Python or equivalent.

Preferred Qualifications

• 2 years of experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.
• Publications at KDD, NeurlPS, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, RECSYS and related conferences/journals, or experience in data mining/machine learning competitions such as Kaggle/KDD-cup etc.

Job Information

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

• Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
• Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
• Exercising sound judgment.

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $153900 - $300960 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate's qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

Responsibilities

Interest-based E-commerce is a new and fast growing business that aims at connecting all customers' interests to excellent sellers and high quality products on TikTok Shop. Different from other traditional E-commerce platforms, TikTok Shop provides customers with personalized and unique shopping experience through E-commerce live-streaming and E-commerce short videos. The recommendation system plays an extremely important role in helping customers explore their shopping interests.

We are a group of applied machine learning engineers and research scientists that focus on E-commerce video/live-streaming recommendations on the major traffic source of TikTok ForU page, where we serve traffic for billions of users every single day. We develop innovative algorithms and ML techniques to improve user engagement and satisfaction, converting creative ideas into business-impacting solutions. We are interested and excited about applying large scale machine learning to solve various real-world problems in E-commerce and recommendation.

• Participate in building large-scale (10 million to 100 million) live-streaming and short video e-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems on TikTok.
• Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking(eg. Click Through Rate and Conversion Rate prediction) , including, but not limited to building real-time data pipelines, feature engineering, model optimization and innovation.
• Build long and short term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of various data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently.
• Design and develop various strategies using ML technology to improve user shopping experience, and resolve e-commerce business challenges, such as the cold start problem and traffic allocation.
• Design and build supporting/debugging tools as needed.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related fields.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• 1 year of experience in applied machine learning, familiar with one or more of the algorithms such as Collaborative Filtering, Matrix Factorization, Factorization Machines, Word2vec, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting Trees, Deep Neural Networks, Wide and Deep etc.
• Experience in Deep Learning Tools such as tensorflow/pytorch.
• Experience with at least one programming language like C++/Python or equivalent.

Preferred Qualifications

• 2 years of experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.
• Publications at KDD, NeurlPS, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, RECSYS and related conferences/journals, or experience in data mining/machine learning competitions such as Kaggle/KDD-cup etc.