Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (TikTok Short Video Content Understanding/Mul

Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (TikTok Short Video Content Understanding/Multimodal Recommendation) - 2026 Start (BS/MS)
Location: San Jose

Employment Type: Regular

Job Code: A148563

Responsibilities

Lead multimodal algorithm development for TikTok’s short-video business, exploring applications of multimodal technologies in recommendation systems and other scenarios to improve key business metrics.

Conduct cutting‑edge research in multimodal and MLLM technologies, design advanced algorithms to solve business requirements while achieving technical breakthroughs.

Drive engineering deployment and implementation, ensuring model stability, scalability, and efficiency in production environments.

Focus on key areas including:

General AI platform design and development, including few‑shot/zero‑shot on MLLM, AI‑labeling, auto prompting, active‑learning, continuous pre‑training 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.

Qualifications

Proven experience in multimodal content understanding, with expertise in large language models (LLMs) and familiarity with cutting‑edge progress in the field.

Strong technical foundation in at least one major deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow).

Proactive mindset, strong sense of ownership, excellent communication skills, and ability to collaborate across teams.

Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

Hands‑on experience deploying content understanding solutions in search, advertising, recommendation, or related domains.

Job Information
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $122,574 – $256,000 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits
Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short‑term and long‑term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

Legal
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment: 1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues; 2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and 3. Exercising sound judgment.

#J-18808-Ljbffr