Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (E-Commerce Recommendation Mall) - 2027 Start

Seattle, WA, United States · Regular employment

About the role

Our E-commerce Recommendation Team is responsible for building and scaling our recommendation system to provide the best shopping experience for our TikTok users. We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Responsibilities

• Generative Recommendation Research: Drive the evolution of recommender systems from discriminative to generative paradigms; explore frontier directions such as generative retrieval and generative re-ranking/blending; continuously improve personalization capabilities while deeply optimizing the training and inference efficiency of generative models on GPUs.
• LLM for Recommendation Research: Leverage Large Language Models (LLMs), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and related techniques to enhance the semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities of recommender systems, addressing core business challenges in e-commerce scenarios (e.g., cold start, long-tail item distribution, and user intent understanding).
• Agentic Recommendation Research: Explore the construction of self-evolving agents and leverage agents to continuously optimize recommender systems; drive the evolution of recommender systems toward agentic architectures capable of keenly perceiving user context and making real-time, personalized decisions and adjustments.
• Long-Term Value and User Experience modeling: Explore replacing traditional heuristic rule-based systems with LLM and agent capabilities; build next-generation algorithms for measuring and optimizing long-term value (LTV) and user experience, enabling sustainable growth of the platform ecosystem.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or a related discipline.
• Solid foundation in machine learning and deep learning, with research or project experience in at least one of the following areas: large language models, reinforcement learning, generative models, recommender systems or information retrieval.
• Proficient in Python and at least one mainstream deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
• Strong problem-solving skills and passion for tackling complex, open-ended research problems.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in recommendation systems, especially in live commerce, e-commerce, search, ads, or other large-scale consumer products.
• Experience with generative recommendation, large recommendation models, retrieval and ranking systems, or related recommendation architecture upgrades.
• Experience with LLMs or multimodal foundation models, including pre-training, post-training, representation learning, contrastive learning, SFT, or RL-based optimization.
• Experience in cross-domain transfer learning, LTV modeling, long-term value optimization, causal inference, or debiasing.
• Experience with long-sequence user behavior modeling, multi-task learning, multi-interest modeling, or large-scale distributed training and inference optimization.
• Publications in top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, ACL, CVPR, SIGIR, or RecSys, or strong achievements in major technical competitions.
• Strong curiosity about new technologies, fast learning ability, and a passion for solving challenging real-world problems.

Pay

The base salary range for this position in Seattle is $121,600 - $243,200 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on qualifications, skills, competencies, experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the total package that may include 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).

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.

We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make an impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We embrace challenges and foster an "Always Day 1" mindset to achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users.