Production ML Engineer - Multimodal & LLMs

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 388,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok Inc. is seeking a highly capable AI researcher/engineer to join the Content Ecology Algorithm Team in Los Angeles.

You will advance core algorithms for LLMs/MLLMs, NLP, CV, and multimodal understanding, building production-ready AI capabilities across TikTok’s platforms. Provide research leadership, translate state-of-the-art advances into scalable systems, and collaborate cross-functionally to deliver measurable business impact while tackling dynamic, multilingual, and highly scalable

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering or a related technical field.
• Strong foundations in machine learning and deep learning, with a solid understanding of Transformer architectures, LLMs, multimodal large language models, and modern representation learning techniques.
• Experience in NLP, computer vision, multimodal understanding, AI agents, knowledge graphs, retrieval and recommendation, conversion modeling, causal uplift modeling, or decision optimization.
• Hands-on experience with Python, PyTorch, distributed model training, and large-scale data processing, with strong algorithmic, software engineering, and production deployment capabilities.
• Proven ability to formulate and solve complex, ambiguous problems, translate research advances into scalable production solutions, and deliver measurable business impact.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration and communication skills, with a track record of driving technically complex projects to high-quality execution.

Responsibilities

• Drive the research and development of core algorithms for TikTok Local Services, leveraging LLMs/MLLMs, Agentic AI, NLP, Computer Vision, conversion modeling, global optimization, and causal uplift modeling.
• Develop deep semantic representations and structured models of content, products, and user intent, while building foundational capabilities across product knowledge graphs, intent understanding, and end-to-end intelligent transaction optimization.
• Continuously enhance both supply- and demand-side experiences to drive sustainable growth in transaction conversion.
• Tackle frontier technical challenges unique to local services, including multilingual and multimodal understanding, highly dynamic environments, and long-horizon sequential decision-making.
• Stay at the forefront of research, translate state-of-the-art advances into production-grade solutions, scale proven innovations, and establish reusable algorithmic foundations with broad applicability.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Transformer architectures

Multimodal learning

NLP

Computer Vision

Production deployment

Cross-functional collaboration

Problem solving

Education

Bachelors in CS/AI

Tools

PyTorch

Distributed training

Job description

TikTok Inc. is seeking a highly capable AI researcher/engineer to join the Content Ecology Algorithm Team in Los Angeles.

You will advance core algorithms for LLMs/MLLMs, NLP, CV, and multimodal understanding, building production-ready AI capabilities across TikTok’s platforms. Provide research leadership, translate state-of-the-art advances into scalable systems, and collaborate cross-functionally to deliver measurable business impact while tackling dynamic, multilingual, and highly scalable