Machine Learning Algorithm Research Engineer - Soaring Star Talent Program

Team Overview

The Research & Development (R&D) team is committed to developing and sustaining industry-leading products that foster global business growth. Joining this team means engaging with essential scenarios like user growth, social functionalities, live streaming, e-commerce consumer experiences, content creation, and content consumption. The team tackles fundamental challenges such as service architecture and infrastructure engineering to ensure systems operate efficiently, securely, and with high quality. It also supports diverse technical needs across various business domains to continuously optimize product performance and user satisfaction.

Why Join Our Team?

• Collaborate creatively: We emphasize creativity as a core value, aiming to innovate products and shape the team's culture for the benefit of the platform, communities, and society.
• Develop through challenges: You will confront demanding projects that foster innovation and have global impact, influencing hundreds of millions of users by introducing new technologies and user experience improvements.
• Engage in a supportive culture: We promote practical problem-solving and excellence, encouraging a consistent "Day 1" mindset. Our diverse and inclusive environment empowers collaboration in an agile and flexible setting.
• Excel and be rewarded: We value high performers by providing greater prospects for involvement in key projects and opportunities to realize their full potential.

Project Description

As a leader in the short-video sector, our recommendation systems face challenges including cold-start problems for new users, the need for swift live-streaming recommendations, maintaining diverse user interests, and managing complex e-commerce recommendation architectures. Conventional methods, reliant on historical behavior, often struggle with new user personalization. Live-streaming demands near real-time responsiveness within narrow time frames, increasing system demands. The single-feed immersive format challenges content diversity maintenance, necessitating a balance between multi-interest learning and preventing content drift from exploratory recommendations. The e-commerce recommendation system structured in multi-stage funnels leads to inconsistencies, costly maintenance, and excessive short-term value focus, resulting in user fatigue from content homogeneity.

This project aims to leverage large language models (LLMs) and large-scale model techniques to overcome these issues. LLMs' extensive knowledge and few-shot reasoning help deduce new users' potential interests from registration and external data, mitigating cold-start challenges. Additionally, integrating graph neural networks (GNNs) with comprehensive user behavior sequences enables precise prediction of social preferences. The exploration of large models’ generalization, long-context understanding, and end-to-end modeling aims to simplify e-commerce recommendation flows, adapt swiftly to real-time changes, and enhance exploratory recommendation impact. The ultimate goal is a streamlined system delivering accurate recommendations that improve user retention and foster sustainable growth.

Qualifications

• PhD degree in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related discipline is preferred.
• Strong programming expertise with a solid foundation in software design principles and coding practices.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities, strong enthusiasm for technology, effective communication, and teamwork skills.
• Knowledge of machine learning, natural language processing, and/or data mining techniques; experience with recommendation systems, computational advertising, or search engines is advantageous.

Additional Information

Company Background: Founded in 2012, ByteDance’s mission is to inspire creativity and enrich lives through a suite of diverse applications including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut, and Pico, along with China-specific platforms like Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua. These products simplify and enhance content creation, consumption, and social connection globally.

Work Culture: ByteDance fosters an environment where curiosity, humility, and impact-driven efforts thrive. The company embraces a multicultural and inclusive workplace, encouraging continuous learning and innovation under an "Always Day 1" philosophy. Diversity and inclusion are foundational, valuing the unique perspectives and skills each employee contributes to the global community.