Machine Learning Engineer, TikTok Brand Ads

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) with match

Parental leave

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Paid holidays

Paid sick leave

Paid personal time

Job summary

TikTok seeks a Machine Learning Engineer for Brand Ads in San Jose. You will build a content understanding engine, retrieve and rerank billions of videos, and advance multimodal representations for ads and content. Join a team focusing on multimodal LLMs to improve ad-content alignment at scale.

The role involves end-to-end model development, offline/online evaluation, and deployment across a high-impact platform. Excellent problem-solving and ML skills are required.

Qualifications

• BS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field and relevant work experience.
• Strong programming, debugging and optimization skills in Go, C/C++, Python.
• Experience with ML, data mining, data analysis, and large-scale systems.
• Good product sense and ability to design and implement features.

Responsibilities

• Build the content understanding engine for a major short-video platform.
• Retrieve and rerank billions of videos, and optimize ads/content connections.
• Develop multimodal representations for brand ads and video content.
• Index and retrieve video content at scale for vector-level matching.
• Set up pipelines to process tens of millions of videos daily.

Skills

Go

C/C++

Python

Problem solving

ML, DL, NLP

Distributed systems

Education

BS in CS/CE or related

Tools

Go

Job description

Discover a career that energizes and excites you every day.

@2026 TikTok

Technology

Machine Learning Engineer, TikTok Brand Ads

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A37699A

Responsibilities

Build the most powerful content understanding engine on the world's leading short-video platform! Retrieve and rerank billions of videos, redefine the intelligent connection between advertising and content with multimodal large language model.TikTok Brand Ads team is hiring multiple MLE/SWE roles, focusing on the in-depth application of multimodal large language models in brand advertising. Join us to build the most powerful content understanding engine on the world's leading short-video platform, retrieve and rerank billions of videos and redefine the intelligent connection between advertising and content with multimodal large language model!The team is responsible for the complete technical chain from data construction, model training, offline evaluation, online deployment, inference optimization to new model exploration, covering key tasks such as multimodal semantic understanding, content matching and ranking, and cross-modal alignment.

Key technical directions

• Multimodal-LLM model development
• Generative retrieval & ranking technology
• Ads ranking
• LLM inference optimization

We are looking for passionate engineers that have strong problem solving skills and algorithm understanding to build and manage systems with high performance, scalability, and availability. You will have the opportunity to partner closely with a globalized engineering and product teams in a high-impact and fast-paced environment.

What you’ll do

• Use large video models to model the semantic meaning of video content and construct structured vector representations.
• Build multimodal representations of brand ads (video/picture + title/script + brand semantics, etc.) to achieve cross-modal alignment.
• Implement an efficient large-scale video content indexing and retrieval system to support vector-level matching and filtering between ad semantics and millions of native videos.
• Set up content understanding pipelines for various business scenarios, processing tens of millions of videos daily.
• Apply technologies such as Embedding Distillation and Hard Negative Mining to optimize the training process.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• BS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or other relevant majors, with related work experience
• Excellent programming, debugging, and optimization skills in one or more general purpose programming languages including but not limited to: Go, C/C++, Python
• Ability to think critically and to formulate solutions to problems in a clear and concise way
• Relevant professional experience with machine learning, data mining, data analysis, distribution system
• Experience with one or more of the following: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, NLP, ranking systems, recommendation systems, backend, large-scale systems, data science, full-stack
• Good product sense and experience designing and implementing product features

Preferred Qualifications

• Possess strong technical background/experience in NLP, LLM, search/advertising/recommendation systems, etc
• Good understanding in one of the following domains: brand ads, content ads, auction, bidding, ranking, and ads forecasting
• Have a strong passion for large language models
• Publications in top-tier conferences and experience in video understanding-related projects

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