Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (E-Commerce Recommendation/Search Alliance) - 2027 Start (PhD)

About the role

The E-commerce Alliance team connects merchants and creators across the TikTok Shop ecosystem. We help merchants achieve their business goals by building intelligent and automated affiliate operation tools, while providing creators with efficient and highly personalized product recommendations that make it easier to discover the right products and create high-quality content. By improving merchant–creator matching, recommendation, search, and end-to-end collaboration efficiency, we aim to expand merchants’ marketing opportunities, increase creators’ monetization potential, and deliver a more engaging and personalized shopping experience to TikTok users.

Responsibilities

Design and build cutting-edge machine learning, recommendation, and ranking algorithms to power large-scale e-commerce recommendation systems that deliver high-quality, real-time product recommendations for millions of users. Develop AI-powered merchant operation systems and AI agents that help merchants optimize affiliate strategies, improve business ROI, and lower the barrier to growing their business through automation. Apply state-of-the-art LLMs , NLP, and multimodal machine learning to discover new business opportunities , driving sustainable growth for both merchants and creators. Collaborate closely with product managers, engineers, and cross-functional teams to bring innovative AI solutions from research to production. Stay at the forefront of advances in AI and machine learning, rapidly prototyping and productionizing new technologies to shape the future of intelligent commerce. Build ML-agents to automate algorithm development workflows, accelerating experimentation, model iteration, evaluation, and deployment.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications: Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Operations Research or a related discipline. Thorough understanding of data structures and algorithms, with excellent problem-solving ability. Deep Understanding of machine learning, statistics, scaling distributed computing, and big data engineering

• Demonstrated software engineering experience from previous internship, work experience, coding competitions, or publications
• Internship experience or research experience, especially in e-commerce, recommendation, search engine
• Publications at conferences such as KDD, NeurIPS, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, CIKM, ICLR, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI.
• Curiosity toward new technologies and entrepreneurship
• High levels of creativity and quick problem-solving capabilities

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $153,900 - $300,960 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, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits

Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 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. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company.

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 from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach.