Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (Recommendations and Search) - 2027 Start (PhD)

About the team

The Tech and Product team of TikTok USDS is missioned to empower TikTok US users to have a great user experience with strong data security and privacy protections, focusing on compliance, reliability, business and product support, and efficiency improvement. As part of this team, you will build and scale high-impact Machine Learning solutions—including recommendation engines, search relevance, and e-commerce systems—designed specifically to deliver personalized, high-performing experiences while ensuring world-class data governance, privacy compliance, and system security for US 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.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, train, and evaluate machine learning models for recommendation systems, search ranking, query understanding, or conversion prediction.
• Implement efficient pipelines for feature extraction, model training, evaluation, offline-to-online deployment, and A/B testing.
• Process and analyze massive user behavior data and catalog logs using distributed systems to construct real-time and offline features.
• Optimize online inference latency and system throughput for high-QPS production microservices.
• Conduct continuous A/B testing, analyze online metrics, identify bottleneck areas, and iterate on models to drive business goals.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, Statistics, or a related discipline.
• Solid background in Data Structures, Algorithms, Computer Systems, and Software Design.
• Strong theoretical understanding and practical knowledge of machine learning concepts.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.
• Publications at KDD, NeurIPS, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, RECSYS and related conferences/journals, or experience in data mining/machine learning competitions such as Kaggle/KDD-cup etc.

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, 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).

Schedule

The company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.

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.

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 an impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users.