Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (E-Commerce Content Recommendation - Generative & Large Recommendation Model) - 2027 Start (PhD)

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

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a PhD‑level researcher/engineer to join the Global E‑Commerce Content Recommendation team in San Jose. You will build and rewrite an industrial recommender serving a billion‑scale user base across short-video, livestream, and product scenarios, delivering end-to-end retrieval, ranking, and blending with ultra-low latency.

The role emphasizes scaling models, generative retrieval, and injecting world knowledge, using CUDA/Triton kernels and distributed training.

Qualifications

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, Statistics or a related discipline
• Solid ML and engineering fundamentals: you understand the math behind the models, and you write clean, efficient, reproducible code with a strong command of algorithms and data structures
• Deep research or engineering practice in at least one of: LLMs / foundation models, NLP, CV, RL, or recommendation / search / ads — and you can articulate why you made the choices you made, and where they fell short
• Genuine enthusiasm for LLM / LRM techniques: you want frontier methods live in production, not parked at offline metrics
• Strong problem definition and decomposition: faced with an ambiguous problem that has no standard answer, you find your own foothold

Responsibilities

• Build and rewrite an industrial recommendation system serving billions of users across short-video, livestream, and product scenarios.
• Scale models: push ranking models to billions of parameters while keeping millisecond latency.
• Develop one-stage generative retrieval and train autoregressive models.
• Inject world knowledge to mine latent user interests and semantic representations.
• Push training and inference to hardware limits with CUDA/Triton and distributed training.

Skills

PhD in CS/AI

ML fundamentals

LLM/NLP/RL research

Problem solving

Production mindset

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

CUDA

Triton

Job description

Location

San Jose

Employment Type

Regular

Job Code

A26927

Responsibilities

Team IntroductionGlobal E-Commerce (TikTok Shop) is one of TikTok's fastest-growing businesses and a core driver of the company's revenue growth. Our Global E-Commerce Content Recommendation team owns the end-to-end recommendation stack for e-commerce video and image-text content on TikTok worldwide — retrieval, ranking, and multi-queue blending; supply ecosystem and cold start; and the browsing-to-purchase experience for hundreds of millions of users.We believe recommendation is being rewritten in the compute era. ID-based collaborative filtering and supervised learning built today's systems and still run most of the industry — but their returns are diminishing, and we are betting the next order of magnitude on rebuilding the stack on LLM foundations. Our ambition is to build the most advanced recommendation system in the world, and the next generation after that.We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth.Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.Responsibilities:You will help build — and rewrite — an industrial recommendation system serving a billion-scale user base across short-video, livestream, and product scenarios, covering retrieval, pre-ranking, ranking, and blending end to end. Every iteration ships to production and directly moves user experience and GMV.

• Scale recommendation models like LLMs. Push ranking models from hundreds of millions to billions of parameters and chart the scaling laws of recommendation: behavior-corpus pre-training; multi-scenario, multi-task, multi-stage joint training; ultra-long behavior-sequence modeling (10K+ events) with KV caching, sequence compression, user/generation (U-G) disaggregated serving, speculative decoding, and dynamic batching — raising MFU while holding a strict millisecond latency budget.
• Build one-stage generative retrieval. Reframe retrieval as generation: tokenize the item space into semantic IDs (RQ-VAE / SID) and train autoregressive models, grounded in MLLM semantics, to generate what a user wants next — collapsing the traditional "multi-channel retrieval + ranking" funnel into a single generative stage. The open problems span the full stack: item tokenizers that balance semantic content against collaborative signal, and SIDs that stay stable while millions of new items arrive daily; post‑training the generator directly on live user feedback (preference optimization, GRPO‑style RL); and decoding under a millisecond budget — beam search, decoding constrained to the valid item space, and test‑time scaling that trades inference compute for better recommendations. The prize is a system freed from its path dependence on ID memorization, where cold‑start generalization comes from semantics rather than impression history.
• Inject world knowledge. Use large models' real‑world knowledge to mine latent user interests and semantic representations beyond what pure ID co‑occurrence can express; use reasoning models to run explicit chain‑of‑thought inference over long‑horizon user intent, making the system materially better at discovery and novelty.
• Push training and inference to the hardware limit. Custom CUDA / Triton fused kernels, memory and computation‑graph optimization, distributed training and inference acceleration, mixed precision and low‑bit quantization — engineered for what makes recommendation hard: sparse embeddings, variable‑length sequences, and many task heads.
• Rewrite R&D with agents. We are embedding coding agents deep into the algorithm‑development loop: automated feature mining and pipeline generation, experiment configuration and training orchestration, automated evaluation and online‑diagnosis attribution, bad‑case mining and patrol. You will be both a user and a builder of this system.
• Do original work on open problems. Long‑term value modelling, repurchase and retention, transaction attribution, fatigue modeling, new‑user recommendation, incremental value modelling, interest exploration, LLM4Rec — problems where industry has no standard answers. We expect, and support, original research: internal papers, patents, and publication at top external venues.

Qualifications

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, Statistics or a related discipline
• Solid ML and engineering fundamentals: you understand the math behind the models, and you write clean, efficient, reproducible code with a strong command of algorithms and data structures.
• Deep research or engineering practice in at least one of: LLMs / foundation models, NLP, CV, RL, or recommendation / search / ads — and you can articulate why you made the choices you made, and where they fell short.
• Genuine enthusiasm for LLM / LRM techniques: you want frontier methods live in production, not parked at offline metrics.
• Strong problem definition and decomposition: faced with an ambiguous problem that has no standard answer, you find your own foothold.

Preferred Qualifications

• Publications at KDD, SIGIR, RecSys, WWW, ACL, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or comparable venues — or high‑quality open‑source work.
• CUDA / Triton kernel development, source‑level deep‑learning‑framework optimization, large‑scale distributed training, or high‑performance inference deployment.
• Hands‑on experience with LLM post‑training (SFT / RLHF / DPO / GRPO), agent‑system construction, or inference acceleration.
• Led or deeply contributed to a key project in search, ads, recommendation, or large models, with a complete problem‑to‑online‑impact loop.
• Awards in ACM‑ICPC, NOI, Kaggle, or comparable competitions.
• Heavy user of AI coding and agentic workflows for building systems and optimizing models.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $162000 - $387600 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.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates

• 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;
• Exercising sound judgment.

About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible.

We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

TikTok Accommodation

TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request

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