Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (E-Commerce) - 2027 Start (PhD)

About the team

Global E-commerce is a content-driven business powered by short-form video and live-streaming, dedicated to becoming the premier destination for users to discover affordable, high-quality products. Our team strives to deliver a tailored and efficient shopping experience while upholding a robust governance and risk control framework to ensure platform integrity, merchant compliance, and a secure ecosystem. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth.

Responsibilities

• Architect and develop sophisticated LLM-based systems to process high-dimensional unstructured data (e.g., text, logs, conversations) from diverse sources.
• Define and implement complex semantic understanding frameworks, including fine-grained intent classification and entity extraction, to achieve deep contextual awareness.
• Apply state-of-the-art techniques to enhance model performance, including Instruction Tuning, RLHF/DPO, and Contextual Prompt Engineering.
• Optimize model serving for production environments using quantization, distillation, and efficient attention mechanisms (e.g., FlashAttention, vLLM).

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, Statistics, or a related discipline.
• Experience in one or more of the following fields: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), or Computer Vision.
• Proficiency in software development with at least one of the following programming languages: C++, Python, Go, or Java.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in fine-tuning, distillation, or reinforcement learning for large language models in conversational AI applications.
• Proficiency in multilingual NLP, machine translation, and cross-lingual dialogue modeling.
• Experience in developing and optimizing e-commerce video and product multimodal large models, combining LLMs with video/product representations to support tasks like multimodal classification, video QA, and cross-modal retrieval.
• A strong understanding of e-commerce policies, dispute resolution workflows, and merchant-buyer interactions to inform AI service design.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $136,800 - $259,200 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including 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; 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).

Schedule

The company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week. On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility.

About the company

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.