Senior ML Engineer: LLMs & Multimodal AI for Local Services

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 218,000 - 480,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning (LLM & Agentic AI - TikTok Local Services) in San Jose to drive research and development of core algorithms for local services, leveraging LLMs/MLLMs, NLP, and multimodal data to improve transaction conversion.

You will build semantic representations, knowledge graphs, and scalable production solutions, collaborating across teams to translate advances into impactful, customer-facing features.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, AI, Software Engineering, or related technical field.
• Strong foundations in ML/DL with Transformer architectures and multimodal LLMs.
• Experience in NLP, CV, multimodal understanding, AI agents, knowledge graphs, or recommendation.
• Hands-on Python, PyTorch, distributed model training, and production deployment.

Responsibilities

• Drive research and development of core algorithms for TikTok Local Services, leveraging LLMs/MLLMs, Agentic AI, NLP, CV, multimodal learning, and optimization.
• Develop deep semantic representations and structured models of content, products, and user intent; build knowledge graphs and end-to-end transactional optimization.
• Enhance supply- and demand-side experiences to drive growth in transaction conversion.
• Tackle multilingual and multimodal challenges in dynamic environments and long-horizon decision-making.
• Translate research advances into production-grade solutions and establish reusable foundations.

Skills

Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Transformer architectures

NLP

Multimodal understanding

Algorithm research

Cross-functional collaboration

Production deployment

Education

Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Python

PyTorch

Distributed training

Data processing

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning (LLM & Agentic AI - TikTok Local Services) in San Jose to drive research and development of core algorithms for local services, leveraging LLMs/MLLMs, NLP, and multimodal data to improve transaction conversion.

You will build semantic representations, knowledge graphs, and scalable production solutions, collaborating across teams to translate advances into impactful, customer-facing features.