Machine Learning Algorithm Research Engineer

About the Team

The TikTok Research & Development team is focused on creating and maintaining top-tier products integral to TikTok's global success. Members work on critical areas including user growth, social interaction features, live streaming, e-commerce consumer experiences, content creation, and consumption. The team addresses intricate technical challenges spanning service architecture and infrastructure to ensure high-quality, efficient, and secure system operations. Collaboration with industry leaders fosters exploration of advanced technologies, impacting hundreds of millions of users. The environment is professional, goal-driven, collaborative, and egalitarian.

Why Join Us?

• Collaborative innovation fuels creativity that benefits the platform, communities, and society.
• Engage with demanding projects that drive industry breakthroughs and global influence, with opportunities to integrate novel technologies enhancing user experience.
• A culture valuing practical solutions, pursuit of excellence, inclusivity, equality, agility, and flexibility nurtures creativity.
• A robust recognition and reward system encourages high performance and provides pathways for impactful projects and personal growth.

Research Project Overview

TikTok’s recommendation systems contend with challenges like data scarcity for new users causing limited personalization, stringent real-time requirements for live streaming recommendations, preserving user interest diversity within immersive feeds, and complex multi-stage e-commerce recommendation pipelines leading to content homogenization and high upkeep. Traditional approaches relying heavily on past user behavior face cold-start limitations, while live streaming demands rapid, dynamic responsiveness within minutes.

The project leverages large language models (LLMs) and advanced technologies to overcome these hurdles. LLMs utilize extensive knowledge bases and reasoning to infer new user intent from registration and external data, addressing cold-start issues. Integrating graph neural networks (GNNs) and comprehensive user behavioral sequences enhances social preference predictions. Furthermore, optimizing e-commerce recommendation workflows via large models improves real-time adaptability, exploratory recommendation quality, and streamlines system complexity to foster better recommendations, increased user retention, and sustainable growth.

Qualifications

• PhD in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Mathematics, or closely related disciplines.
• Proficient programming skills combined with solid software design and coding practices.
• Exceptional problem-solving abilities, passion for technology, effective communication, and teamwork orientation.
• Familiarity with machine learning, natural language processing, and data mining; experience in recommendation systems, computational advertising, or search engines is advantageous.

Company Mission and Culture

TikTok is a premier short-form mobile video platform committed to inspiring creativity and spreading joy. With global headquarters in Los Angeles and Singapore and offices worldwide, TikTok fosters an environment of curiosity, humility, and impact-driven collaboration. The company embraces diversity and inclusion, valuing varied skills, perspectives, and experiences, and strives to create a workplace reflective of the diverse user communities it serves.