ML Engineer, Conversational AI & Agent Systems

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

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (Conversational AI) for a 2027 start in San Jose. The role focuses on building and refining agent runtime, memory systems, and tool integration to support long multi-turn conversations.

Ideal candidates have a strong ML/NLP foundation, hands-on experience with LLMs or agents, and the ability to translate research into production-grade code. A Bachelor's degree in a related field is required, with parallel emphasis on experimentation and

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS/EE/Math or related discipline.
• Strong Python and one of C++/Go/Rust/Java.
• Solid ML/DL/NLP fundamentals with hands-on LLM/agent experience.
• Basic statistical literacy (confidence intervals, p-values).
• Ability to turn papers/blogs into working code.
• Experience building runtime, memory/context-management, tool-use agents, or fine-tuned models.

Responsibilities

• Agent runtime orchestration: manage skills, tools, and context; implement loop control, guardrails, and safe fallbacks.
• Develop long-term agent memory and context management with structured playbooks and deterministic curation.
• Apply post-training methods (SFT/DPO/RLHF/RLAIF/RLVR) and distillation for model efficiency.
• Manage Tools, Skills, and MCP: tool APIs, search, governance, and on-demand loading.
• Design evaluation systems: LLM-as-judge, calibration, and robust eval workflows.
• Build self-improving loops: case mining, root-cause, candidate generation, and replay verification.
• Oversee online experimentation with shadow/canary/A-B testing and safe deployment.

Skills

Bachelor's degree in CS/EE/Math

Python

C++/Go/Rust/Java

ML/DL/NLP fundamentals

Read papers into working code

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics or related discipline

Tools

LLMs / agents runtime harness

vLLM / TensorRT-LLM

MoE / KV / prompt caching

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (Conversational AI) for a 2027 start in San Jose. The role focuses on building and refining agent runtime, memory systems, and tool integration to support long multi-turn conversations.

Ideal candidates have a strong ML/NLP foundation, hands-on experience with LLMs or agents, and the ability to translate research into production-grade code. A Bachelor's degree in a related field is required, with parallel emphasis on experimentation and