ML Engineer, AI Safety & Real-Time Guardrails

TikTok Inc.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 178,000 - 342,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer - AI Safety to join the USDS Data Governance and Assurance Engineering team. You will build high-performance engines that audit, evaluate, and mitigate risks in real-time across TikTok’s GPAI and recommendation systems.

You’ll design automated safety evaluation pipelines, implement adversarial robustness, and develop governance controls to ensure training data and model weights comply with safety constraints, with ms-level

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
• Software Engineering: 2+ years of production-level software development (Go, Python, or C++).
• Systems at Scale: Experience with distributed systems and high-volume ML data pipelines (Spark, Flink, Kafka).
• ML Foundations: Strong grasp of data structures, algorithms, and ML fundamentals (DL, optimization, evaluation metrics).

Responsibilities

• Automated Safety Evaluation: Design and scale high-throughput engines to benchmark LLM and Recommendation outputs against safety and bias protocols.
• Adversarial Robustness: Build monitoring frameworks to identify vulnerabilities in recommendation logic and model behavior.
• Governance-as-Code: Architect metadata frameworks and control planes for ML pipelines, ensuring data and weights adhere to safety constraints.
• Real-time Mitigation: Develop low-latency safety filters and circuit breakers for ms-level latency in real-time streams.
• Observability & Lineage: Create platforms for real-time observability of model decisions, ensuring auditability and compliance.

Skills

Go

Python

C++

Distributed Systems

Spark

Flink

Kafka

Data Structures

Algorithms

Deep Learning

Evaluation Metrics

AI Safety

LLM Evaluation

Prompt Defense

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Spark

Flink

Kafka

Job description

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer - AI Safety to join the USDS Data Governance and Assurance Engineering team. You will build high-performance engines that audit, evaluate, and mitigate risks in real-time across TikTok’s GPAI and recommendation systems.

You’ll design automated safety evaluation pipelines, implement adversarial robustness, and develop governance controls to ensure training data and model weights comply with safety constraints, with ms-level