ML Engineer: AI Safety & Real-Time Governance

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 137,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer - AI Safety to build high-performance engines auditing AI systems for safety, bias, and compliance. You will craft automated guardrails for real-time GPAI and recommender deployments and drive adversarial robustness and governance-as-code initiatives.

The role emphasizes real-time mitigation, observability, and lineage to ensure traceability of model decisions while operating in a high-stakes US data environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related technical field.
• 2+ years of production-level software development (Go, Python, or C++).
• Experience with distributed systems and high-volume ML data pipelines (e.g., Spark, Flink, or Kafka).
• Strong grasp of data structures, algorithms, and ML fundamentals (Deep Learning, Optimization, Evaluation Metrics).

Responsibilities

• Automated Safety Evaluation: Design and scale high-throughput evaluation engines to benchmark LLM and Recommendation Model outputs against safety, bias, and accuracy protocols.
• Adversarial Robustness: Build and maintain continuous monitoring frameworks to proactively identify vulnerabilities in recommendation logic and model behavior.
• Governance-as-Code: Architect metadata frameworks and control planes for ML pipelines, ensuring training data and model weights adhere to purpose-limitation and safety constraints.
• Real-time Mitigation: Develop low-latency safety filters and "circuit breakers" that can intervene in real-time recommendation streams (ms-level latency) without compromising system performance.
• Observability & Lineage: Create centralized platforms that provide real-time observability into model decisions, ensuring every algorithmic "promotion" is traceable, auditable, and compliant.

Skills

Go/Python/C++

Distributed Systems

ML Fundamentals

Data Pipelines

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/ML

Tools

Spark/Flink/Kafka

Job description

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer - AI Safety to build high-performance engines auditing AI systems for safety, bias, and compliance. You will craft automated guardrails for real-time GPAI and recommender deployments and drive adversarial robustness and governance-as-code initiatives.

The role emphasizes real-time mitigation, observability, and lineage to ensure traceability of model decisions while operating in a high-stakes US data environment.