Machine Learning Engineer

Join TikTok in San Jose as a Machine Learning Engineer on the Business Governance team. This onsite role offers a competitive total compensation package, starting with a base salary of $156,000 to $387,600 per year, plus comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k) with company match, paid parental leave, disability and life insurance, wellbeing benefits, and generous paid time off. You will apply multimodal understanding and large language model technologies to build content safety systems that scale across video, text, image, and audio.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) savings plan with company match
• Paid parental leave
• Short-term and long-term disability coverage
• Life insurance
• Wellbeing benefits
• 10 paid holidays per year
• 10 paid sick days per year
• 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated on hire with accruals increasing with tenure)

Responsibilities

• Develop content safety algorithms for TikTok, Lemon8, and short-form drama platforms, covering multimodal understanding and risk detection across video, text, image, and audio
• Leverage machine learning, deep learning, and large model technologies to improve content moderation pipelines, enhance operational efficiency, and ensure model robustness and production stability
• Own the training and application of LLMs and MLLMs for content safety use cases, including post-training techniques such as SFT, RLHF, DPO, and safety alignment
• Drive the exploration and productionization of emerging capabilities such as AI Agents, multimodal reasoning, and video understanding to build next-generation intelligent moderation systems

Requirements

• Bachelor degree or above in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, or related fields
• Strong understanding of machine learning and deep learning, with familiarity with Transformer architectures, LLMs, and MLLMs
• Hands-on experience in Python, PyTorch, distributed training, and large-scale data processing, with solid algorithmic and engineering capabilities
• Proven ability to solve complex problems and collaborate effectively in cross-functional teams, with a track record of driving projects to high-quality execution

Technologies

• Python
• PyTorch

About the Team

We are building next-generation Trust and Safety systems powered by large language models and multimodal foundation models to protect TikTok, Lemon8, and short-form video platforms. Our team focuses on multimodal reasoning, content understanding, and large-scale risk detection across text, image, audio, and video. We actively explore and productionize cutting-edge technologies such as LLM post-training, multimodal models, and AI Agents to build intelligent, scalable, and adaptive content moderation.

About TikTok

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

Why join us

Inspiring creativity is central to TikTok's mission. Our innovative product helps people authentically express themselves, discover, and connect, with diverse teams across the globe enabling that impact. We value curiosity, humility, and collaboration, and approach challenges as opportunities to learn and innovate together. An always-day-one mindset fuels meaningful breakthroughs for our people, our company, and our users.

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 worldwide, and our workplace reflects the communities we reach. We celebrate diverse voices and aim to create an environment where everyone can contribute and thrive.

TikTok Accommodation

TikTok provides reasonable accommodations in our recruitment process for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs, and other protected reasons. If you need assistance or accommodations, please reach out at

https://tinyurl.com/RA-request

Fair Chance Act and Compliance

• 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.
• Criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on certain job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment:
• Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues
• Handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information
• Exercising sound judgment

Compensation and Benefits Details

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $156,000 – $387,600 annually. Compensation may vary outside this range based on factors such as qualifications, skills, competencies, experience, and location. Base pay is part of the total package, which may include discretionary bonuses or incentives and restricted stock units. Benefits may vary by employment type and location. Day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) with company match, paid parental leave, disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, 10 holidays, 10 sick days, and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated on hire with tenure-based accruals) are included. The company reserves the right to modify benefits programs at any time.