Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (TikTok-Data-Search-Search Quality) - 2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 317,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (TikTok-Data-Search-Search Quality) for a 2027 start in San Jose. This full-time PhD Graduate role offers opportunities to work on cutting-edge search technology and NLP, CV, and recommender-system methods in a global team.

You will contribute to building and refining TikTok's search engine, collaborating across content understanding, user modeling, and retrieval. Onboarding is required by year-end with strong research exposure expected.

Qualifications

• PhD completed or expected to graduate before onboarding.
• Experience in search, information retrieval, ranking, recommendation systems, NLP, multimodal learning, or large language models.

Responsibilities

• Apply NLP and CV technology and LLMs to match the most relevant videos for each search query and improve relevance of TikTok search.
• Model user behavior to enhance personalization in search.
• Improve video understanding using NLP, CV, and LLM for better search authority and usefulness.
• Develop retrieval, ranking, relevance evaluation, query understanding, multimodal search, or LLM application methods and translate ideas into scalable product improvements.

Skills

NLP

Information retrieval

Multimodal learning

LLMs

Model training

Distributed systems

Education

PhD degree in Computer Science / Electrical Engineering / Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence / Information Retrieval / Natural Language Processing / Data Mining / Statistics

Job description

Discover a career that energizes and excites you every day.

@2026 TikTok

Technology

Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (TikTok-Data-Search-Search Quality) - 2027 Start (PhD)

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A221713A

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Responsibilities

Our Search Engineering Team is responsible for building and owning TikTok's search engine which can provide our users with the best search experience. In TikTok Search Team, you'll have the opportunity to build full-stack search engine system and combine information retrieval technology with modern machine learning methods from related fields such as NLP, CV, and recommender system. We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving.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.This full-time PhD Graduate role provides early-career researchers and engineers the opportunity to join one of our engineering teams where you will have the opportunity to: possible directions include:

• - Content understanding: Applying the industry's cutting-edge NLP and CV technology and leveraging LLM to match the most relevant videos for each search query, and continuously improve the relevance of TikTok search.
• - User Behavior Modeling: solving the recommendation problem in search, let TikTok search increase the ability of personalization on the basis of "relevant", and understand users better.
• - Video understanding: comprehensive use of NLP, CV, as well as LLM for better video understanding from the perspective of the video itself and social network, improve authority, credibility, and usefulness of search results.
• - Search research and evaluation: developing new retrieval, ranking, relevance evaluation, query understanding, multimodal search, or LLM application methods and translating research ideas into scalable product improvements.

Qualifications

• Minimum Qualifications-Individuals currently pursuing or recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Statistics, or a related technical field.
• Must have graduated with an applicable degree before onboarding.
• Research or practical experience in one or more areas: search, information retrieval, ranking, recommendation systems, natural language processing, multimodal learning, large language models, data mining, or machine learning systems.
• Preferred Qualifications- Publications, preprints, patents, open-source contributions, or research projects in search, recommendation, NLP, information retrieval, machine learning, or related areas.
• Experience with large-scale retrieval, ranking, model training, evaluation, online experimentation, distributed systems, or production ML systems.
• Familiarity with relevance evaluation, query understanding, semantic retrieval, vector search, LLM applications, or multimodal search.
• Ability to define ambiguous technical problems, compare solution paths, and communicate trade-offs clearly.
• Interest in applying research to improve search quality, user experience, and product impact at global scale.
• As a condition of employment, all successful candidates must be able to establish authorization to work in the United States.
• For this position, the Company does not provide sponsorship or any immigration-related benefits.

Job Information

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

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. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.

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