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LLM Research Scientist Graduate (eCommerce Recommendation)- 2025 Start (PhD)

AT TikTok
TikTok

LLM Research Scientist Graduate (eCommerce Recommendation)- 2025 Start (PhD)

Seattle, WA

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.

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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.

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 data scientists that focus on E-commerce recommendations. We are developing innovative algorithms and techniques to improve user engagement and satisfaction, converting creative ideas into business-impacting solutions. We are interested and excited about applying large scale machine learning to solve various real-world problems in E-commerce. The rapid development of large language models has brought more possibilities to e-commerce business. We are actively trying to use large language models to solve some problems in e-commerce recommendations and have made substantial progress. Therefore, we will continuously invest more resources in the research of recommendation algorithms based on large language models.

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2025. 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.

Responsibilities:
1. Continuously track and understand the latest research progress of large language models, including pre-training, fine-tuning, instruction fine-tuning, prompt engineering, multimodal large models, etc.
2. Actively explore the combined application of large language models and recommendation systems to solve practical problems in recommendation systems, including person-goods matching, commodity governance, interest exploration, commodity understanding, and generative recommendation.
3. Cooperate with the infrastructure team to improve the efficiency of large model training, develop large model services, and improve the stability and scalability of training and services.
4. Cooperate with scientists in the team to publish research results in top academic conferences and expand the influence of the team.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:
- Current or recent graduates with a background in Computer Science, related technical field or equivalent industry experience, with top artificial intelligence conference papers (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL, EMNLP, etc.) in machine learning (ML), computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP) and other fields.
- Hands-on experience in one or more of the following areas: Large Language Models (LLM), Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, Data Mining, or Natural Language Processing
- Excellent programming skills, data structure and algorithm skills, proficient in C/C++ or Python programming language, candidates with awards in ACM/ICPC, NOI/IOI, Top Coder, Kaggle and other competitions are preferred.
- Familiar with architecture and implementation of at least one mainstream machine learning programming framework (TensorFlow/PyTorch/MXNet)

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.

Our company benefits are designed to convey company culture and values, to create an efficient and inspiring work environment, and to support our employees to give their best in both work and life. We offer the following benefits to eligible employees:

We cover 100% premium coverage for employee medical insurance, approximately 75% premium coverage for dependents and offer a Health Savings Account(HSA) with a company match. As well as Dental, Vision, Short/Long term Disability, Basic Life, Voluntary Life and AD&D insurance plans. In addition to Flexible Spending Account(FSA) Options like Health Care, Limited Purpose and Dependent Care.

Our time off and leave plans are: 10 paid holidays per year plus 17 days of Paid Personal Time Off (PPTO) (prorated upon hire and increased by tenure) and 10 paid sick days per year as well as 12 weeks of paid Parental leave and 8 weeks of paid Supplemental Disability.

We also provide generous benefits like mental and emotional health benefits through our EAP and Lyra. A 401K company match, gym and cellphone service reimbursements. 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.

Client-provided location(s): Seattle, WA, USA
Job ID: TikTok-7436124095655201032
Employment Type: Other

Perks and Benefits

  • Health and Wellness

    • Health Insurance
    • Dental Insurance
    • Vision Insurance
    • HSA
    • Life Insurance
    • Fitness Subsidies
    • Short-Term Disability
    • Long-Term Disability
    • On-Site Gym
    • Mental Health Benefits
    • Virtual Fitness Classes
  • Parental Benefits

    • Fertility Benefits
    • Adoption Assistance Program
    • Family Support Resources
  • Work Flexibility

    • Flexible Work Hours
    • Hybrid Work Opportunities
  • Office Life and Perks

    • Casual Dress
    • Snacks
    • Pet-friendly Office
    • Happy Hours
    • Some Meals Provided
    • Company Outings
    • On-Site Cafeteria
    • Holiday Events
  • Vacation and Time Off

    • Paid Vacation
    • Paid Holidays
    • Personal/Sick Days
    • Leave of Absence
  • Financial and Retirement

    • 401(K) With Company Matching
    • Performance Bonus
    • Company Equity
  • Professional Development

    • Promote From Within
    • Access to Online Courses
    • Leadership Training Program
    • Associate or Rotational Training Program
    • Mentor Program
  • Diversity and Inclusion

    • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Program
    • Employee Resource Groups (ERG)

Company Videos

Hear directly from employees about what it is like to work at TikTok.