Senior Machine Learning Engineer, E-commerce Feed Recommendation

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 218,000 - 388,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok Inc. in San Jose, CA, is seeking an ML engineer for its Interest-based E-commerce team, working on TikTok Shop’s video/live-streaming recommendations powering billions of daily users.

You will join a group of ML engineers and researchers applying large-scale ML to e-commerce and recommendations, building systems and experiments that impact user experience.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related field.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• 3 years of experience in applied machine learning, familiar with one or more of the algorithms such as Collaborative Filtering, Matrix Factorization, Factorization Machines, Word2vec, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting Trees, Deep Neural Networks, Wide and Deep etc.
• Experience in Deep Learning Tools such as TensorFlow/PyTorch.
• Experience with at least one programming language like C++/Python or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Participate in building large-scale (10 million to 100 million) live-streaming and short video e-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems on TikTok.
• Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking, including building real-time data pipelines, feature engineering, model optimization and innovation.
• Build long and short term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently.
• Design and develop strategies using ML to improve user shopping experience and resolve e-commerce business challenges, such as cold start and traffic allocation.
• Design and build supporting/debugging tools as needed.

Skills

Programming

Problem solving

Applied ML

C++/Python

Education

B.S. in CS or related

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

Responsibilities

About the team

Interest-based E-commerce is a new and fast growing business that aims at connecting all customers' interests to excellent sellers and high quality products on TikTok Shop. Different from other traditional E-commerce platforms, TikTok Shop provides customers with personalized and unique shopping experience through E-commerce live-streaming and E-commerce short videos. The recommendation system plays an extremely important role in helping customers explore their shopping interests.

We are a group of applied machine learning engineers and research scientists that focus on E-commerce video/live-streaming recommendations on the major traffic source of TikTok ForU page, where we serve traffic for billions of users every single day. We develop innovative algorithms and ML techniques to improve user engagement and satisfaction, converting creative ideas into business-impacting solutions. We are interested and excited about applying large scale machine learning to solve various real-world problems in E-commerce and recommendation.

Responsibilities

• Participate in building large-scale (10 million to 100 million) live-streaming and short video e-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems on TikTok.
• Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking(eg. Click Through Rate and Conversion Rate prediction) , including, but not limited to building real-time data pipelines, feature engineering, model optimization and innovation.
• Build long and short term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of various data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently.
• Design and develop various strategies using ML technology to improve user shopping experience, and resolve e-commerce business challenges, such as the cold start problem and traffic allocation.
• Design and build supporting/debugging tools as needed.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related fields.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• 3 years of experience in applied machine learning, familiar with one or more of the algorithms such as Collaborative Filtering, Matrix Factorization, Factorization Machines, Word2vec, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting Trees, Deep Neural Networks, Wide and Deep etc.
• Experience in Deep Learning Tools such as tensorflow/pytorch.
• Experience with at least one programming language like C++/Python or equivalent.

Preferred Qualifications

• 3 years of experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.
• Publications at KDD, NeurlPS, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, RECSYS and related conferences/journals, or experience in data mining/machine learning competitions such as Kaggle/KDD-cup etc.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $218400 - $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.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

About the team

Interest-based E-commerce is a new and fast growing business that aims at connecting all customers' interests to excellent sellers and high quality products on TikTok Shop. Different from other traditional E-commerce platforms, TikTok Shop provides customers with personalized and unique shopping experience through E-commerce live-streaming and E-commerce short videos. The recommendation system plays an extremely important role in helping customers explore their shopping interests.

We are a group of applied machine learning engineers and research scientists that focus on E-commerce video/live-streaming recommendations on the major traffic source of TikTok ForU page, where we serve traffic for billions of users every single day. We develop innovative algorithms and ML techniques to improve user engagement and satisfaction, converting creative ideas into business-impacting solutions. We are interested and excited about applying large scale machine learning to solve various real-world problems in E-commerce and recommendation.

Responsibilities

• Participate in building large-scale (10 million to 100 million) live-streaming and short video e-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems on TikTok.
• Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking(eg. Click Through Rate and Conversion Rate prediction) , including, but not limited to building real-time data pipelines, feature engineering, model optimization and innovation.
• Build long and short term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of various data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently.
• Design and develop various strategies using ML technology to improve user shopping experience, and resolve e-commerce business challenges, such as the cold start problem and traffic allocation.
• Design and build supporting/debugging tools as needed.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related fields.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• 3 years of experience in applied machine learning, familiar with one or more of the algorithms such as Collaborative Filtering, Matrix Factorization, Factorization Machines, Word2vec, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting Trees, Deep Neural Networks, Wide and Deep etc.
• Experience in Deep Learning Tools such as tensorflow/pytorch.
• Experience with at least one programming language like C++/Python or equivalent.

Preferred Qualifications

• 3 years of experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.
• Publications at KDD, NeurlPS, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, RECSYS and related conferences/journals, or experience in data mining/machine learning competitions such as Kaggle/KDD-cup etc.