Algorithm Engineer, TikTok E-Commerce (Conversational AI)

About the team
The future of e-commerce customer service is intelligent, efficient, and AI-driven. Our team is dedicated to replacing traditional human-agent customer service with an advanced AI-powered conversational system that provides instant, intelligent, and seamless support for TikTok's global e-commerce platform. By leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and NLP, we are building an AI customer service system that can understand user queries, resolve disputes, guide transactions, and enhance the overall shopping experience without the need for human intervention.
Our cutting-edge AI is designed to handle complex customer interactions, including answering product inquiries, resolving order issues, processing refunds, and assisting sellers with operational tasks. Through LLM post-training, we ensure that our AI assistant is continuously learning and improving, providing more accurate, context-aware, and human-like interactions.
By joining us, you will be at the forefront of transforming customer service in e-commerce, helping build an AI system that understands, adapts, and provides intelligent solutions-all while reducing costs and improving efficiency for merchants and the platform.
What You Will Do
- Develop AI-Powered Customer Service Systems: Design and implement an AI-driven conversational customer service agent that can handle e-commerce inquiries, complaints, refunds, dispute resolutions, and logistical issues, replacing traditional human customer service agents.
- LLM Post-Training & Data-Efficient Learning: Apply state-of-the-art LLM post-training techniques, such as instruction tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and continual learning, to optimize AI customer service responses with minimal labeled data.
- Benchmark and training data construction: Identify challenging customer service interactions, such as policy clarifications, dispute handling, and multi-turn complaint resolution, and construct specialized datasets to enhance AI training.
- Develop Multilingual Customer Support: Build AI models capable of handling customer service interactions across multiple languages and cultural contexts, ensuring accurate translation and appropriate responses for a diverse global audience.
- Optimize Model Efficiency & Deployment: Work on model compression, quantization, and efficient inference techniques to ensure the AI customer service assistant can run at scale with low latency and high reliability.
Responsibilities
1. Develop AI Customer Support Systems: Build and optimize AI-driven customer service models capable of handling high-volume, complex user inquiries while ensuring high response accuracy and reliability.
2. Enhance LLM-Based Customer Interaction Models: Implement LLM post-training strategies to improve customer support interactions, reducing errors, hallucinations, and irrelevant responses.
3. Create Automated Dispute Resolution & Policy-Adaptive AI: Develop intelligent models capable of handling disputes, verifying transaction details, and ensuring platform compliance in automated responses.
4. Develop Multilingual Support & Translation Models: Enhance the platform's AI translation capabilities for real-time multilingual customer service interactions, ensuring smooth cross-language communication.
5. Refine Response Evaluation Metrics: Define and implement quality evaluation metrics for AI-generated responses to track customer satisfaction and improve conversational AI quality through A/B testing and iterative optimization.
6. Enable AI-Seller Collaboration: Build AI-powered seller assistance tools to help merchants quickly respond to customer inquiries, manage store operations, and resolve disputes efficiently.
7. Optimize Large-Scale Model Deployment: Work on model compression, inference optimization, and edge AI deployment to ensure real-time, high-quality customer service experiences at scale.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications
-Bachelor and above with majors in computer science, computer engineering, statistics, applied mathematics, data science or other related disciplines.
- At least 3 years of work experience in the related field
- LLM Development & Post-Training Expertise: Experience in fine-tuning, distillation, or reinforcement learning of large language models for conversational AI applications.
- Multilingual AI Development: Proficiency in multilingual NLP, machine translation, and cross-lingual dialogue modeling.
Preferred Qualifications
- E-commerce Business Acumen: Understanding of e-commerce policies, dispute resolution workflows, and merchant-buyer interactions to enhance AI service design.
- Advanced NLP & Deep Learning: Strong grasp of AI agents, retrieval augmented generation, mixture of experts, sparse attention, reinforcement learning, inference time scaling etc. for improving AI dialogue quality.
- Scalability & Efficiency: Experience in distributed model training, low-latency inference, and edge AI for large-scale customer service applications.

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

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $137750 - $237500 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including 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 may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. 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).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

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.