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.

Our Trust and Safety team is fast growing and responsible for building machine learning models and systems to protect our users from the impact of negative content. Our mission is to protect billions of users and publishers across the globe every day. We embrace state-of-the-art machine learning technologies and scale them to moderate the tremendous amount of data generated on the platform. With the continuous efforts from our team, TikTok is able to provide the best user experience and bring joy to everyone in the world.

The achievement of our mission relies on comprehensive understanding of content on the platform. We are looking for talented senior research scientists to help us enhance our content understanding techniques which are used in a variety of downstream business projects. We expect you to have solid experience in content understanding domain including but not limited to CV, NLP, Multimodal, and LLM. This position will work with a team of excellent research scientists and machine learning engineers to propose, develop, and implement innovative content understanding models and scale them to improve the experience of billions of Tiktok users around the world.

Responsibilities - What You'II Do
• Work with team members to design next generation CV/NLP/Audio multimodality models.
• Work on highly-scalable classifiers, predictive models and algorithms in big data mining, computer vision, NLP and other domains.
• Work with engineering teams to implement model pipeline and deploy the service at scale.
• Collaborate with product team to define objectives and improve trust and safety strategy.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualification
- Master degree with at least 4 years of practical experience, or PhD degree with at least 2 years of practical experience in one or more areas of content understanding, including but not limited to:
- Multimodal understanding, such as video representation learning, temporal action localization, etc.
- Vision <> language, such as image/video captioning, retrieval, VQA, etc.
- Large language model domain adaption, such as SFT, LORA, etc.
- Experience in addressing research problems independently.
- Experience in coding and debugging with Python, proficient in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
- Experience in communication research to audiences of different backgrounds.
Preferred Qualification
- Ability to understand the full picture of the domain and think beyond specific challenges.
- Experience working with XFN in an agile environment and ability to deliver in a fast-paced environment.
- Proven record of research experience demonstrated by peer-reviewed publications in top AI/ML conference(s).

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 $194000 - $355000 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.