Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (Data-eCommerce) - 2025 Start (PhD)

San Jose, CA, United States

Responsibilities

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 its offices include New York, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us

Creation is the core of TikTok's purpose. Our platform is built to help imaginations thrive. This is doubly true of the teams that make TikTok possible.

Together, we inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we all believe in and aim towards achieving every day.

To us, every challenge, no matter how difficult, is an opportunity; to learn, to innovate, and to grow as one team. Status quo? Never. Courage? Always.

At TikTok, we create together and grow together. That's how we drive impact - for ourselves, our company, and the communities we serve.

Join us.

About the Teams

E-commerce - Recommendation and Marketing

E-commerce is a new and fast growing business that aims at connecting all customers to excellent sellers and quality products on TikTok Shop, through E-commerce live-streaming, E-commerce short videos, and commodity recommendation. We are a group of applied machine learning engineers and research scientists that focus on E-commerce recommendations. We are responsible for building up and scaling our recommendation system to provide the most stable and best shopping experience for our TikTok users.

E-commerce - Alliance

The E-commerce Alliance team aims to serve merchants and creators in the e-commerce platform to meet merchants' business indicators and improve creators' creative efficiency. By cooperating with merchants and creators, we aim to provide high-quality content and a personalized shopping experience for TikTok users, create efficient shopping tools at seller centers, and promote cooperation between merchants and creators.

E-commerce - Search

The Search E-Commerce team is responsible for the search algorithm for TikTok's rapidly growing global e-commerce business. We use state-of-the-art large-scale machine learning technology, the cutting-edge NLP, CV and multi-modal technology to build the industry's top-class search engine to provide the best e-commerce search experience, for more than 1 billion monthly active TikTok users around the world. Our mission is to build a world where "there is no hard-to-sell good-priced product in the world".

E-commerce - Search Growth

The Search Growth E-commerce team is at the forefront of developing the search recommendation algorithm for TikTok's rapidly expanding global e-commerce enterprise. Utilizing cutting-edge machine learning technology, advanced NLP, CV, recommendation, and multi-modal technology, we're shaping a pioneering engine within the industry. Our objective is to deliver the ultimate e-commerce search experience to over 1 billion active TikTok users worldwide. Our mission: to create a world where "there are no hard-to-sell, overpriced products."

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2024. As a graduate, you will get unparalleled opportunities for you to kickstart your career, pursue bold ideas and explore limitless growth opportunities. Co-create a future driven by your inspiration with TikTok.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to one of the following start dates below:

1. January 15, 2025

2. February 5, 2025

3. March 4, 2025

4. May 20, 2025

5. June 17, 2025

6. July 15, 2025

7. August 12, 2025

8. September 3, 2025

We will prioritize candidates who are able to commit to these start dates. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. We encourage you to apply early.

Candidates can apply for a maximum of TWO positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you applied for. The application limit is applicable to TikTok and its affiliates' jobs globally.

Candidates who pass resume evaluation will be invited to participate in TikTok's technical online assessment through HackerRank.

What You Will Do

- Design and build large-scale machine learning algorithms to deeply optimize e-commerce search engines such as query analysis, retrieval, ranking and correlation calculations, and various business indicators of sorting scenarios, including relevance, click-through rate, conversion rate, creator add/post product rate, etc.

- Build machine learning solutions and algorithm strategies by the analysis and mining of a large number of user queries to empower the merchant side and improve the overall matching ability of the platform

- Support the rapid development of TikTok's e-commerce business, serve millions of buyers and sellers, explore more efficient business models, satisfy users with the best shopping experience, and promote healthy ecological development

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

- PhD Degree in computer science or relevant areas.

- Experience with a solid foundation in data structure and algorithm design, and be proficient in using one of the programming languages such as Python, Java, C++, R, etc.;

- Familiar with common machine/deep learning, causal inference, and operational optimization algorithms, including classification, regression, clustering methods, as well as mathematical programming and heuristic algorithms;

- Familiar with at least one framework of TensorFlow / PyTorch / MXNet and its training and deployment details,as well as the training acceleration methods such as mixed precision training and distributed training;

- Familiar with big data related frameworks and application, those who are familiar with MR or Spark are preferred

- Passionate about designing machine learning algorithms to power search engines and recommendation systems.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience in recommendation systems, online advertising, ranking, search, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.

- Publications at KDD, NeurlPS, 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.

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. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://shorturl.at/cdpT2

By submitting an application for this role, you accept and agree to our global applicant privacy policy, which may be accessed here: https://careers.tiktok.com/legal/privacy.