Senior Machine Learning Engineer - TikTok Short Video Content Understanding/Multimodal Recommendation

San Jose, California, US Until 8/21/2026 H-1B sponsor history First posted March 29, 2026 Last posted March 29, 2026
Job description

Description

Our team's mission is to empower content understanding for TikTok Short Video business. We focus on cutting-edge research in content understanding and the development of advanced LLM/MLLM algorithms and applications, including generative recommendation, weakly-supervised learning, few-shot classification, video tagging, multi-task learning, multilingual learning, multimodal pretraining, and more. We aim to succeed both in driving measurable business impact (e.g., recommendation metrics) and delivering state-of-the-art research outputs.

Responsibilities
1. Lead multimodal algorithm development for TikTok’s short-video business, explore applications of multimodal technologies in recommendation systems and other scenarios to improve key business metrics.
2. Conduct cutting-edge research in multimodal and MLLM technologies, design advanced algorithms to solve business requirements while achieving technical breakthroughs.
3. Drive engineering deployment and implementation, ensuring model stability, scalability, and efficiency in production environments.
4. Focus on key areas including (but not limited to):
- General AI platform design and development, including few-shot/zero-shot on MLLM, AI-labeling, auto prompting, active-learning, continue pretraining and RL.
- Integration of content understanding with recommendation systems (e.g., UGC ecosystems, cold start, interest exploration, comment understanding).
- Leveraging multimodal techniques to develop next-generation recommendation systems, such as generative models and end-to-end approaches.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications
1. Proven experience in multimodal content understanding, with expertise in large language models (LLMs) and familiarity with cutting-edge progress in the field.
2. Strong technical foundation in at least one major deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow).
3. Proactive mindset, strong sense of ownership, excellent communication skills, and ability to collaborate across teams.

Preferred Qualification
1. Hands-on experience deploying content understanding solutions in search, advertising, recommendation, or related domains.

About this role

Summary

Lead multimodal algorithms and research for TikTok's content understanding and recommendation systems.

Job title

Senior Machine Learning Engineer - TikTok Short Video Content Understanding/Multimodal Recommendation

Experience level

senior level

Industry

software

Location requirements

San Jose, remote work not specified

Salary

Not specified

Visa sponsorship

H-1B sponsor history

Management role

No

Skills & keywords

Required skills

multimodal content understandinglarge language modelsdeep learning framework

Preferred skills

deploying content understanding solutions

Specializations

multimodalmllmrecommendationdeep learning
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

San Jose, CA, USA

On-site City