Machine Learning Engineer

TikTok is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer in San Jose, onsite, to advance multimodal content understanding and short-video recommendations by leading research, development, and production deployment of algorithms that drive key business metrics.

Responsibilities

• Lead development of multimodal algorithms for TikTok's short-video platform, applying multimodal technologies to recommendations and related scenarios to improve key business metrics.
• Conduct advanced research in multimodal and MLLM technologies, designing algorithms that meet business requirements while achieving technical breakthroughs.
• Oversee deployment and production efforts to ensure model stability, scalability, and efficiency.
• Design and build AI platform capabilities, including few-shot/zero-shot on MLLM, AI labeling, auto prompting, active learning, continued pretraining, and reinforcement learning.
• Integrate content understanding with recommendation systems, addressing areas such as user-generated content ecosystems, cold start, interest exploration, and comment understanding.
• Apply multimodal techniques to create next-generation recommendation systems, including generative models and end-to-end approaches.

Requirements

• Proven experience in multimodal content understanding with expertise in large language models and familiarity with the latest progress in the field.
• Strong technical foundation in at least one major deep learning framework, such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Proactive mindset with a strong sense of ownership, excellent communication, and ability to collaborate across teams.
• Hands-on experience deploying content understanding solutions in search, advertising, or recommendation contexts.

Technologies

• PyTorch
• TensorFlow
• LLMs
• MLLM

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance from day one.
• 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 tenure-based accruals.

Compensation and Location

Location: San Jose, CA onsite

Base salary range: USD 156,000 - 387,600 annually

Compensation may vary outside the stated range based on a candidate's qualifications, skills, competencies, and experience, as well as location. Base pay is one component of the total package, which may include discretionary bonuses, incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary by employment type and country. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with company match, paid parental leave, disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, and more. The company reserves the right to modify benefits programs at any time.

About TikTok

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

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is central to TikTok's mission. Our product enables authentic self expression, discovery, and connection, supported by diverse, globally distributed teams that create value for communities and bring joy each day.

Diversity and Inclusion

TikTok is committed to building an inclusive workplace where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and perspectives. We celebrate diverse voices and strive to reflect the communities we reach in our teams and products.

TikTok Accommodation

TikTok provides reasonable accommodations in recruitment for candidates with disabilities or other protected reasons. If you need assistance, please reach out at the accommodation request link: https://tinyurl.com/RA-request

Los Angeles County Candidate Requirements

• Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal and external clients and colleagues.
• Handling and managing confidential information including proprietary data and access to IT systems.
• Exercising sound judgment.