Tech Lead: Generative Recommendation Foundation Models

TikTok; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 242,000 - 456,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Short-term and long-term disability

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Paid holidays

Paid sick days

Paid Personal Time

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Tech Lead Research Scientist for the Recommendation Foundation Models team in Seattle. You will own foundation models from research to production and drive event-sequence-driven, multimodal recommendation systems at scale.

The role requires strong ML/LLM expertise, leadership across teams, and a track record of producing measurable online impact, with a focus on production deployment and efficiency.

Qualifications

• MS/PhD in CS or related field with research experience.
• Demonstrated impact with LLMs in industry or academia.
• Strong ML and deep learning fundamentals; expertise in LLMs or generative recommendations.
• Ability to lead complex technical work from problem definition through evaluation and deployment.
• Preferred: experience leading roadmaps or mentoring researchers and engineers.
• Experience with foundation-model training or post-training, reinforcement learning, or preference optimization.
• Expertise in generative retrieval, semantic tokenization, multimodal understanding, long-sequence user modeling, or efficient training and inference.
• Evidence of impact through production launches, reusable contributions, or publications at ML/NLP venues.

Responsibilities

• Own foundation models from research to production: define the modeling strategy and lead data, architecture, pre-training, mid-training, and post-training through deployment.
• Advance LLM-native, event-sequence-driven recommendation: model user behavior and intent to improve retrieval, ranking, and end-to-end generative recommendation.
• Build multimodal representations and semantic tokenizers that connect product, content, and behavioral signals and transfer across scenarios.
• Deliver measurable online impact: establish rigorous evaluations and experiments, balancing recommendation quality and long-term user value with latency and inference cost.
• Lead through hands-on execution: guide model and system design, align research and engineering partners, and mentor colleagues while staying close to code and experiments.

Skills

MS/PhD in CS

LLM impact

Generative systems

ML fundamentals

Cross-team leadership

Education

MS/PhD in CS

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Tech Lead Research Scientist for the Recommendation Foundation Models team in Seattle. You will own foundation models from research to production and drive event-sequence-driven, multimodal recommendation systems at scale.

The role requires strong ML/LLM expertise, leadership across teams, and a track record of producing measurable online impact, with a focus on production deployment and efficiency.