Machine Learning Engineer — AI Safety & Assurance

About the Team

You will join the TikTok USDS JV - Data Governance and Assurance Engineering team, the architects of the foundational infrastructure managing the end-to-end AI lifecycle. Our mission is to ensure the integrity, security, and compliance of our AI assets through automated frameworks and advanced content assurance standards. Our team operates at the high-stakes intersection of TikTok's State-of-the-Art (SOTA) Recommendation Systems, Adversarial ML, and AI Governance. We are building the "safety operating system" for TikTok’s US data, replacing manual oversight with scalable, automated code that enforces safety and alignment across one of the world's most sophisticated algorithmic ecosystems.

About the Role

As a Machine Learning Engineer - AI Safety at USDS, you will be responsible for the technical "guardrails" and integrity of TikTok’s recommendation and General Purpose AI (GPAI) systems. You will build the high-performance engines that audit, evaluate, and mitigate risks in real-time.

Core Focus Areas

• Recommendation & GPAI Assurance: Architecting auditable recommendation pipelines to ensure content delivery systems meet strict USDS compliance and safety requirements.
• Algorithmic Interpretability: Enhancing the transparency of recommendation signals to ensure model decisions are explainable and aligned with safety protocols.
• Continuous Monitoring & Mitigation: Developing automated pipelines to evaluate, monitor, and fine-tune GPAI/LLM deployments to proactively mitigate risks such as bias, toxicity, and misinformation.

Responsibilities

• Automated Safety Evaluation: Design and scale high-throughput evaluation engines to benchmark LLM and Recommendation Model outputs against safety, bias, and accuracy protocols.
• Adversarial Robustness: Build and maintain continuous monitoring frameworks to proactively identify vulnerabilities in recommendation logic and model behavior.
• Governance-as-Code: Architect metadata frameworks and control planes for ML pipelines, ensuring training data and model weights adhere to purpose-limitation and safety constraints.
• Real-time Mitigation: Develop low-latency safety filters and "circuit breakers" that can intervene in real-time recommendation streams (ms-level latency) without compromising system performance.
• Observability & Lineage: Create centralized platforms that provide real-time observability into model decisions, ensuring every algorithmic "promotion" is traceable, auditable, and compliant.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
• Software Engineering: 2+ years of experience in production-level software development (Go, Python, or C++).
• Systems at Scale: Proven experience with Distributed Systems and handling high-volume ML data pipelines (e.g., Spark, Flink, or Kafka).
• ML Foundations: Strong grasp of Data Structures, Algorithms, and Machine Learning fundamentals (Deep Learning, Optimization, Evaluation Metrics).

Preferred Qualifications

• AI Safety Expertise: Direct experience in AI Alignment, Model Interpretability (XAI), or Adversarial Machine Learning.
• LLM Specialization: Familiarity with LLM evaluation frameworks (e.g., G-Eval, RAGAS), safety fine-tuning (RLHF/DPO), or prompt-injection defense.
• RecSys Knowledge: Deep understanding of modern content recommendation systems (e.g., Two-tower models, Deep Ranking, Reinforcement Learning).
• Full-Stack ML Tech: Proficiency in Go (Golang) for high-performance backend infrastructure and Python/PyTorch for ML modeling and research.
• Regulatory Translation: A proven ability to translate complex legal and safety policies into rigorous, scalable technical implementations.

About USDS

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale. On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.

Compensation

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $177,688 – $341,734 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on 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

• Day one access to 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 upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure)