Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (E-Commerce Recommendation Mall) - 2027 Start

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Paid holidays

Job summary

TikTok Inc. in San Jose, CA is seeking a Graduate Research Engineer to join the E-commerce Recommendation Team and advance generative and LLM-based recommender research, delivering personalized shopping experiences for TikTok users.

You will work on generative retrieval, RL, and agentic systems to optimize performance and user experience, collaborating with ML, data, and product teams. A CS/EE/Math/Stats degree and strong Python plus DL framework skills are required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or related field.
• Strong foundation in ML/DL with experience in LLMs, RL, generative models, or recommender systems.
• Proficient in Python and at least one DL framework (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX).

Responsibilities

• Drive generative recommendation research: evolve recommender systems from discriminative to generative paradigms and optimize training/inference on GPUs.
• Apply LLMs, RL, and related techniques to improve semantic understanding and reasoning in recommender systems for e-commerce scenarios.
• Explore agentic recommendation research: build self-evolving agents for real-time, personalized decisions and adjustments.
• Model long-term value and user experience to enable sustainable growth of the platform.

Skills

Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

Research Experience

Education

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

Tools

LLM frameworks

Job description

Responsibilities

Our E-commerce Recommendation Team is responsible for building up and scaling our recommendation system to provide the best shopping experience for our TikTok users.

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.
Candidates can apply to a maximum of two positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you apply. The application limit is applicable to our Company and its affiliates' jobs globally. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early.

Responsibilities:
- Generative Recommendation Research: Drive the evolution of recommender systems from discriminative to generative paradigms; explore frontier directions such as generative retrieval and generative re-ranking/blending; continuously improve personalization capabilities while deeply optimizing the training and inference efficiency of generative models on GPUs.
- LLM for Recommendation Research: Leverage Large Language Models (LLMs), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and related techniques to enhance the semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities of recommender systems, addressing core business challenges in e-commerce scenarios (e.g., cold start, long-tail item distribution, and user intent understanding).
- Agentic Recommendation Research: Explore the construction of self-evolving agents and leverage agents to continuously optimize recommender systems; drive the evolution of recommender systems toward agentic architectures capable of keenly perceiving user context and making real-time, personalized decisions and adjustments.
- Long-Term Value and User Experience Modeling: Explore replacing traditional heuristic rule-based systems with LLM and agent capabilities; build next-generation algorithms for measuring and optimizing long-term value (LTV) and user experience, enabling sustainable growth of the platform ecosystem.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:
- Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or a related discipline.
- Solid foundation in machine learning and deep learning, with research or project experience in at least one of the following areas: large language models, reinforcement learning, generative models, recommender systems or information retrieval.
- Proficient in Python and at least one mainstream deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
Strong problem-solving skills and passion for tackling complex, open-ended research problems.

Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience in recommendation systems, especially in live commerce, e-commerce, search, ads, or other large-scale consumer products.
- Experience with generative recommendation, large recommendation models, retrieval and ranking systems, or related recommendation architecture upgrades.
- Experience with LLMs or multimodal foundation models, including pre-training, post-training, representation learning, contrastive learning, SFT, or RL-based optimization.
- Experience in cross-domain transfer learning, LTV modeling, long-term value optimization, causal inference, or debiasing.
- Experience with long-sequence user behavior modeling, multi-task learning, multi-interest modeling, or large-scale distributed training and inference optimization.
- Publications in top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, ACL, CVPR, SIGIR, or RecSys, or strong achievements in major technical competitions.
- Strong curiosity about new technologies, fast learning ability, and a passion for solving challenging real-world problems.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $128000 - $316800 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:

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:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. Exercising sound judgment.