Research Engineer Graduate (Monetization Technology - Business Integrity) - 2027 Start

About the role

Our Business Integrity team has a strong user focus and a dedication to technical excellence. We aim to meet our users’ needs with reliable and high-performing platforms and services. We are looking for strong machine learning engineers who are excited to grow their business understanding, build highly scalable machine learning models, and partner across disciplines with global teams to build a next-generation content understanding system for TikTok monetization.

With the explosive growth of digital content, intelligent moderation has become a core capability for internet platforms. The current landscape presents challenges including the dynamic nature of moderation rules, content complexity, sample scarcity, escalating adversarial behaviors, and a lack of interpretability. Existing open-source large models often underperform in scenarios involving evolving moderation rules, long-form text, long temporal sequences, multi-languages, limited sample data, and adversarial content generated by AIGC.

Responsibilities

• Build a leading moderation system that enables end-to-end capabilities for accurate rejection decisions, interpretable reasoning, and intelligent remediation, achieving fully automated moderation with performance surpassing human benchmarks.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• Completing or recently completed a Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Automation, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline (completed, or expecting to graduate within 12 months). Exceptional Bachelor's candidates with strong research output will also be considered.
• Hands-on experience implementing, training, or deploying models in one or more of the following areas: Ads, Search, Recommender Systems, NLP, CV, Multimodal, or Agent technologies — through coursework, internships, or industry projects.
• Familiarity with the fundamentals of large language models (e.g., pre-training, fine-tuning, prompting, inference, and deployment), with practical experience in at least one of these stages.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: clean, testable code, version control, and the ability to debug complex systems end to end.
• Proficient in Python and at least one deep learning framework such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Strong problem-solving ability, a collaborative mindset, and a genuine interest in applying AI to real-world products.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale distributed training (DeepSpeed, Megatron, FSDP) or high-throughput inference (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM).
• Experience with production model deployment, serving optimization, or latency/cost tuning.
• Experience building data pipelines for large-scale training or evaluation.
• Experience building agentic systems, RAG pipelines, or multimodal applications.
• Familiarity with the ads / search / recommendation industry stack.
• Open-source contributions, strong results in ML competitions (Kaggle, Tianchi, ACM/ICPC), or granted patents.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $128,000 - $256,000 annually. Compensation may vary depending on a candidate’s 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, and 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, fostering an inclusive environment where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people globally, and our workplace reflects the diverse communities we reach.