PhD-Grad ML Engineer, Search & Multimodal AI

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

Job summary

TikTok is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (TikTok-Data-Search-Search Quality) for a 2027 start in San Jose. This full-time PhD Graduate role offers opportunities to work on cutting-edge search technology and NLP, CV, and recommender-system methods in a global team.

You will contribute to building and refining TikTok's search engine, collaborating across content understanding, user modeling, and retrieval. Onboarding is required by year-end with strong research exposure expected.

Qualifications

• PhD completed or expected to graduate before onboarding.
• Experience in search, information retrieval, ranking, recommendation systems, NLP, multimodal learning, or large language models.

Responsibilities

• Apply NLP and CV technology and LLMs to match the most relevant videos for each search query and improve relevance of TikTok search.
• Model user behavior to enhance personalization in search.
• Improve video understanding using NLP, CV, and LLM for better search authority and usefulness.
• Develop retrieval, ranking, relevance evaluation, query understanding, multimodal search, or LLM application methods and translate ideas into scalable product improvements.

Skills

NLP

Information retrieval

Multimodal learning

LLMs

Model training

Distributed systems

Education

PhD degree in Computer Science / Electrical Engineering / Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence / Information Retrieval / Natural Language Processing / Data Mining / Statistics

Job description

TikTok is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (TikTok-Data-Search-Search Quality) for a 2027 start in San Jose. This full-time PhD Graduate role offers opportunities to work on cutting-edge search technology and NLP, CV, and recommender-system methods in a global team.

You will contribute to building and refining TikTok's search engine, collaborating across content understanding, user modeling, and retrieval. Onboarding is required by year-end with strong research exposure expected.