ML Engineer - Scalable Multimodal Search for E-Commerce

TikTok; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 154,000 - 301,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok's Search E-Commerce team is building a world-class search experience for a global user base. This PhD Graduate role combines state-of-the-art NLP, CV, and multimodal methods to power the platform’s e-commerce queries, with a focus on scalable, high-impact research and product improvements.

We invite graduates to join a fast-paced engineering environment, work on challenging problems, and contribute to groundbreaking research that informs real-world search quality, user experience, and

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing or recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, AI, Information Retrieval, NLP, Data Mining, Statistics, or a related field.
• Research or practical experience in search, information retrieval, ranking, recommendation systems, NLP, multimodal learning, LLMs, data mining, or ML systems.
• Publications, preprints, patents, open-source contributions, or research projects in search, recommendation, NLP, information retrieval, ML, or related areas (preferred).
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Content understanding: Applying NLP/CV tech and LLM to match relevant videos for each search query, improving TikTok search relevance.
• User Behavior Modeling: address the recommendation problem in search and enhance personalization on the basis of relevance.
• Video understanding: use NLP, CV, and LLM for better video understanding and credible search results.
• Search research and evaluation: develop retrieval/ranking methods and translate research ideas into scalable product improvements.

Skills

Content understanding

User behavior modeling

Video understanding

Search research

Education

PhD in CS/related field

Job description

TikTok's Search E-Commerce team is building a world-class search experience for a global user base. This PhD Graduate role combines state-of-the-art NLP, CV, and multimodal methods to power the platform’s e-commerce queries, with a focus on scalable, high-impact research and product improvements.

We invite graduates to join a fast-paced engineering environment, work on challenging problems, and contribute to groundbreaking research that informs real-world search quality, user experience, and