TikTok

Research Scientist - TikTok Recommendation(NextGen LLM) - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)

TikTok$218K — $480K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, Statistics, or related field.
  • Experience in computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning.
  • Proficient in a major deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow).
  • Familiar with deep neural network architectures (e.g., transformers, CNNs).
  • Strong analytical skills; capability to collaborate effectively.

Responsibilities

  • Join a team dedicated to GenAI and content understanding.
  • Develop large recommendation models to improve content distribution.
  • Integrate multimodal models for advanced content analysis.
  • Create autonomous recommendation agents with planning capabilities.
  • Explore and address challenges in extreme-scale reasoning and multimodal fusion.

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance from day one.
  • 401(k) savings plan with company match.
  • Paid parental leave and disability coverage.
  • Life insurance and wellbeing benefits.
  • Generous paid time off including holidays and personal days.
Full Job Description
Responsibilities

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume. About the team Our team's mission is to empower genAI and content understanding in TikTok businesses. Computer vision and natural language processing are important dimensions in both content generation and understanding. We are working on various foundational models, including multi-modality pretraining, multi-modal large language model, image generation, video generation etc. As a genAI team on the business side, we try to succeed in both achieving business metric gains (recommendation metrics), and also producing state-of-the-art research outputs. Project Overview, Challenges & Value We aim to integrate recommendation large models multimodal large models, and the Agentic Rec framework to fundamentally reshape the underlying content distribution logic, empowering the system with deep semantic association and autonomous planning capabilities, exploring new frontiers in algorithmic design. 1. Recommendation Large Models: Address challenges such as gradient convergence and representation drift in ultra-long behavioral sequences, enabling the system to achieve true ""logical reasoning"" capabilities. 2. Unified Multimodal Semantic Space: Explore alignment across video, image-text content, and user intent, constructing a fully multimodal semantic space that goes beyond text. 3. Agentic Rec:Develop recommendation agents with capabilities such as self-reflection, tool invocation, and long-horizon planning, driving a transformation of recommendation and content distribution experiences. Key challenges include: 1. Extreme-scale reasoning: Performance gains and bottlenecks associated with ultra-large model parameters and ultra-long sequence modeling. 2. Multimodal fusion: Challenges in representation learning for cross-modal intent alignment. 3. Autonomous evolution: Breakthroughs in long-horizon planning and decision-making paradigms for agent systems. Project Value: 1. Technical value: Explore new paradigms for recommendation, significantly improving recommendation performance and system efficiency. 2. Business value: Enable deeper understanding of user interests and content, improving distribution efficiency and enhancing satisfaction for both users and creators.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications: 1. Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related field. 2. Experience in one of more areas of computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning 3. Solid knowledge and experience with at least one major deep learning framework (e.g. PyTorch, Tensorflow, MXNet, Caffe/Caffe2). 4. Familiar with deep neural network architectures such as transformer/SSM/CNN/RNN/LSTM etc. Strong analytical and problem solving skills. Ability to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams. Preferred Qualifications: 1. Degree in computer science, electrical engineering or related fields 2. Authors with publications in top-tier venues such as SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency]Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $218400 - $480000 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.

About TikTok

TikTok is a social media app that allows users to create and share short videos. The app was launched in 2016 by Chinese tech company ByteDance. TikTok has become one of the most popular social media apps in the world, with over 1 billion active users. The app has been downloaded over 2 billion times worldwide. TikTok has faced controversy over its data privacy practices and its potential ties to the Chinese government. In 2020, the app faced a potential ban in the United States, but a deal was reached with Oracle and Walmart to create a new company called TikTok Global.
Learn more about TikTok
Size
1,750 employees
Industry
Founded
2012

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