Research Engineer Graduate (Monetization Technology - Business Integrity) - 2027 Start

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 128,000 - 256,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok in San Jose is seeking a Research Engineer Graduate for Monetization Technology - Business Integrity. You will contribute to a next-generation content understanding system that improves advertiser value and user experience by building scalable machine learning models and moderation pipelines.

You’ll work with global teams to ship reliable, high-performing solutions and gain deep product context through hands-on experimentation.

Qualifications

• Master's degree in CS, software engineering, or related technical discipline, with expected graduation within 12 months.
• Hands-on experience implementing or deploying ML models in Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, multimodal, or agent tech.
• Familiarity with large language models including pre-training, fine-tuning, prompting, inference and deployment.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and ability to debug complex end-to-end systems.
• Proficiency in Python and DL frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.

Responsibilities

• Build a leading moderation system enabling end-to-end capabilities for accurate decisions and interpretable reasoning.
• Develop scalable machine learning models and partner across disciplines with global teams.
• Contribute to a next-generation content understanding system for monetization and advertiser value.

Skills

Python

Software engineering fundamentals

ML model deployment

NLP/Multimodal

Collaboration

Problem solving

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science / related field

Bachelor's with strong research output (exceptional candidates)

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

DeepSpeed

Megatron

FSDP

Job description

Research Engineer Graduate (Monetization Technology - Business Integrity) - 2027 Start

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A117654B

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Responsibilities

Our Business Integrity team has a strong user focus and a dedication to technical excellence. We aim to meet our users’ needs with reliable and high-performing platforms and services. We are looking for strong machine learning engineers who are excited to grow their business understanding, build highly scalable machine learning models, and partner across disciplines with global teams, in pursuit of excellence. Given the fast growth of TikTok in the world, we are working on building a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization. We are seeking Research Engineers who are experienced in machine learning, which can help us create an ecosystem that rewards high-quality user experience and advertiser value.Topic Content: With the explosive growth of digital content, intelligent moderation has become a core capability for internet platforms. However, as moderation scenarios grow increasingly complex and adversarial tactics continue to evolve, traditional approaches are facing unprecedented challenges. The current landscape is characterized by multiple technical difficulties, including the dynamic nature of moderation rules, content complexity, sample scarcity, escalating adversarial behaviors, and a lack of interpretability. In particular, existing open-source large models often do not perform as effective as we expect in scenarios involving evolving moderation rules, long-form text, long temporal sequences, multi-languages, limited sample data, and adversarial content generated by AIGC.We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth.Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.Candidates can apply to a maximum of two positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you apply. The application limit is applicable to our Company and its affiliates' jobs globally. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will build a leading moderation system that enables end-to-end capabilities for accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and intelligent remediation, achieving fully automated moderation with performance surpassing human benchmarks.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:- Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline (completed, or expecting to graduate within 12 months). Exceptional Bachelor's candidates with strong research output will also be considered.- Hands-on experience implementing, training, or deploying models in one or more of the following areas — Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies — through coursework, internships, or industry projects.- Familiarity with the fundamentals of large language models (e.g. pre-training, fine-tuning, prompting, inference and deployment), with practical experience in at least one of these stages.- Strong software engineering fundamentals: clean, testable code, version control, and the ability to debug complex systems end to end.- Proficient in Python and at least one deep learning framework such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.Strong problem-solving ability, a collaborative mindset, and a genuine interest in applying AI to real-world products.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with large-scale distributed training (DeepSpeed, Megatron, FSDP) or high-throughput inference (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM).- Experience with production model deployment, serving optimization, or latency/cost tuning.- Experience building data pipelines for large-scale training or evaluation.- Experience building agentic systems, RAG pipelines, or multimodal applications.- Familiarity with the ads / search / recommendation industry stack.- Open-source contributions, strong results in ML competitions (Kaggle, Tianchi, ACM/ICPC), or granted patents.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $128000 - $256000 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.

About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.

We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

TikTok Accommodation

TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request

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