Machine Learning Engineer Graduate

About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy.

About the Role

This full-time Graduate Machine Learning Engineer role (2027 Start) provides early-career engineers the opportunity to join the Search Engineering Team. This team is responsible for building and owning TikTok's search engine to provide users with the best search experience. You will have the opportunity to build full-stack search engine systems, combining information retrieval technology with modern machine learning methods from fields such as NLP, CV, and recommender systems. The team embraces a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth.

Key Responsibilities

• Participate in the improvement of the search core algorithm.
• Content understanding: Applying cutting-edge NLP and CV technology, and leveraging LLM to match the most relevant videos for each search query and continuously improve the relevance of TikTok search.
• User Behavior Modeling: Solving recommendation problems in search to increase personalization on the basis of "relevant" and better understand users.
• Video understanding: Comprehensive use of NLP, CV, and LLM for better video understanding from the perspective of the video itself and social networks, improving authority, credibility, and usefulness of search results.
• Search systems engineering: Designing, building, testing, and maintaining search services, data pipelines, tools, or platform components that support search quality, reliability, latency, and user experience.
• Commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Experience with at least one programming language such as Python, Java, C++, Go, or JavaScript through coursework, internships, projects, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with search, recommendation, machine learning, information retrieval, natural language processing, ranking, data mining, or backend systems.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, databases, data pipelines, online experimentation, or large-scale service development.
• Experience using data or metrics to debug, evaluate, or improve a product or system.
• Interest in building Search products and systems for a large-scale consumer platform.

Qualifications

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related technical discipline.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.