Research Scientist Graduate (Conversational AI) - 2027 Start (PhD)

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

Job summary

TikTok Inc. is expanding a team to build the next-generation unified Agent system for its global e-Commerce customer service, covering 30+ languages and a vast online surface.

We seek PhD-level researchers and engineers who can design self-evolving loops, harness memory and tools, and deliver a trustworthy, scalable agent runtime with strong evaluation. Successful candidates should commit to onboarding by year end.

Qualifications

• PhD or soon-to-be graduate in a quantitative field.
• Strong Python plus one of C++/Go/Rust/Java; hands-on ML/NLP experience.
• Solid fundamentals in ML, DL, NLP with real-world work on LLMs or agents.
• Statistical literacy: confidence intervals, p-values, and data interpretation.

Responsibilities

• Develop agent runtime: harness, loop orchestration, context and memory management.
• Implement safety layers: budgets, timeouts, gates, and safe fallbacks.
• Design memory for long multi-turn agents and retrieval workflows.
• Lead data flywheel: SFT/DPO/RL to encode rules into weights and distill models.
• Govern tools and skills: search, loading, and governance of service definitions.
• Set up rigorous evaluation: A/B testing, statistical rigor, and scalable dashboards.

Skills

Python

C/C++/Go/Rust/Java

ML/DL/NLP fundamentals

Statistical literacy

Paper-to-code

Education

PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or related

Job description

Responsibilities

Team Introduction: We build the next-generation unified Agent system for TikTok's global e-Commerce customer service – running in 30+ languages across one of the largest e-Commerce surfaces on the internet.

Our north star is a self-evolving Agent: post-training, harness, memory / context engineering, tools, and evaluation form one closed loop, and every served conversation becomes the next iteration's training / eval / retrieval / skill-induction signal. This loop is already running in production – cases are mined, root-caused, turned into constrained candidates, replayed against frozen regression sets, and shipped behind guardrails.

Two things make this team different from most "LLM application" work:

• We build the agent runtime itself – Codex / Claude-Code-class – not prompts on top of a vendor API.
• Evaluation and experimentation are first-class systems, not an afterthought. A self-improving loop optimizes whatever signal you give it, so the hardest and most valuable engineering here is making the judgment trustworthy – not just making the model change.

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.

Responsibilities

• Agent runtime (harness / agent loop). Orchestrate skills, tools, and context; implement loop control & intervention, progressive disclosure, and behavior-level guardrails. Build the production safety layer – pre-flight budgets and timeout truncation, serve-time gates, shadow / swap-in answer delivery, and safe fallback paths.
• Context & memory for long multi-turn agents. Agentic memory (structured note-taking), context compaction / summarization, context editing / observation masking, and just-in-time (retrieve-then-load) retrieval. Treat context as an evolving, itemized playbook – with structured diffs and a deterministic curator – rather than an ever-growing prompt.
• Post-training & the data flywheel. SFT / DPO / RL to internalize rules into weights (so the prompt gets shorter, not longer), plus distillation to smaller serving models. Turn served conversations into training / eval / retrieval signals.
• Tools, Skills, and MCP. Tools-as-APIs, connectors, skill / tool search for large inventories, and skill-library governance – description conflicts, trigger evals, cross-skill mis-fire matrices, and on-demand loading instead of dumping every definition into context.
• Evaluation you can bet a launch on. LLM-as-judge with human-agreement calibration; statistical rigor – paired comparison, confidence intervals, repeated sampling, pass^k; held-out and time-rolling eval splits with overfitting alarms; cascaded scoring and cross-family judge panels to make evaluation affordable at scale.
• The self-evolving loop. Case mining → automatic root-cause → constrained candidate generation → replay verification against frozen regression sets → canary → flywheel. Build the plumbing that makes it auditable: candidate registry with exact runtime read-back, change lineage, and an archive of rejected candidates you can sample from next round.
• Online experimentation & causal readout. Shadow / canary / A-B, non-inferiority gates, traffic-split health, metric definitions that survive scrutiny, and off-policy counterfactual evaluation where live A/B isn't possible.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualification(s)

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or a related discipline
• Strong Python plus one of C++ / Go / Rust / Java
• Solid ML / DL / NLP fundamentals, with genuine hands-on experience with LLMs or agents (coursework, research, internship, competition, open-source, or a serious side project)
• Basic statistical literacy - you can compute a confidence interval, explain what a p-value does and doesn't mean, and tell the difference between "the number went up" and "the system got better"
• Able to read a paper or an engineering blog and turn it into working code

Preferred Qualification(s)

• Have built the runtime, not just called an API - even at research / hobby / competition scale: your own agent loop / harness, a memory / context-management system, a RAG or tool-use agent, or a fine-tuned / post-trained model
• Hands-on experience in any one of the following - depth in one is enough, breadth welcome:
  • Post-training: SFT / DPO / RLHF / RLAIF / RLVR, reward modeling, reward hacking and how to defend against it
  • Agent systems: harness, context engineering, MCP / Skills, sub-agents, tool search
  • Evaluation & experimentation: LLM-as-judge and judge calibration, pass^k, regression suites, A/B and non-inferiority testing, off-policy evaluation
  • Self-improving / evolutionary systems: evolutionary program search, candidate archives and parent sampling, automatic prompt / context optimization, multi-objective (Pareto) selection and credit assignment
  • Inference & serving: vLLM / TensorRT-LLM, MoE, KV / prompt caching, and the cost engineering that comes with it
  • Multilingual NLP
  • Publications (for PhD), strong competition results (ACM-ICPC / Kaggle / ML competitions), or notable open-source contributions
  • Taste for the honest number. We'd rather hire someone who says "this result isn't significant yet" than someone who ships a green dashboard. If you've ever killed your own experiment because the evidence didn't hold up, tell us about it.
  • e-Commerce or multilingual experience is a plus, not required

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $162000 - $387600 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.