Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (Data-Global E-Commerce-Search) - 2027 Start (PhD)

Description

The Search E-Commerce team spearheads the development of TikTok's advanced search algorithm, crucial for its booming global e-commerce platform. Utilizing state-of-the-art large-scale machine learning, along with cutting-edge NLP, CV, and multi-modal technologies, we are committed to creating a top-tier search engine. Our goal is to deliver the best e-commerce search experience to over a billion monthly TikTok users worldwide. Our mission is to create a world where "no reasonably priced product is difficult to sell."

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. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

This full-time PhD Graduate role provides early-career researchers and engineers the opportunity to join one of our engineering teams where you will have the opportunity to:
Participate in applied research and improvement of the search core algorithm, possible directions include:
- Content understanding: Applying the industry's cutting-edge NLP and CV technology and leveraging LLM to match the most relevant videos for each search query, and continuously improve the relevance of TikTok search.
- User Behavior Modeling: solving the recommendation problem in search, let TikTok search increase the ability of personalization on the basis of "relevant", and understand users better.
- Video understanding: comprehensive use of NLP, CV, as well as LLM for better video understanding from the perspective of the video itself and social network, improve authority, credibility, and usefulness of search results.
- Search research and evaluation: developing new retrieval, ranking, relevance evaluation, query understanding, multimodal search, or LLM application methods and translating research ideas into scalable product improvements.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications
- Currently pursuing or recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Statistics, or a related technical field.
- Research or practical experience in one or more areas: search, information retrieval, ranking, recommendation systems, natural language processing, multimodal learning, large language models, data mining, or machine learning systems.

Preferred Qualifications
- Publications, preprints, patents, open-source contributions, or research projects in search, recommendation, NLP, information retrieval, machine learning, or related areas.
- Experience with large-scale retrieval, ranking, model training, evaluation, online experimentation, distributed systems, or production ML systems.
- Familiarity with relevance evaluation, query understanding, semantic retrieval, vector search, LLM applications, or multimodal search.
- Ability to define ambiguous technical problems, compare solution paths, and communicate trade-offs clearly.
- Interest in applying research to improve search quality, user experience, and product impact at global scale.

As a condition of employment, all successful candidates must be able to establish authorization to work in the United States. For this position, the Company does not provide sponsorship or any immigration-related benefits.