LLM Machine Learning Engineer, TikTok Search

About TikTok

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 we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.

We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

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.

About the team

Our Search Team is responsible for building and owning TikTok's search engine which provides our users the best search experience. On the TikTok Search Team, you’ll have the opportunity to build a full-stack search engine system and combine information retrieval technology with modern machine learning methods from related fields such as NLP, Computer Vision, Multimodal, and Recommender Systems. We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving.

Job Responsibilities

Be responsible for the iterative optimization of photo-text search quality and relevance algorithm directions. Based on multi-modal technology for photo-text content understanding, grasp the core characteristics of the photo-text genre, focus on optimizing photo-text relevance models, solve core pain points such as photo-text semantic alignment and cross-modal matching, break through technical bottlenecks, expand the contribution of photo-text search to the search business, and create a high-quality photo-text search experience that meets user needs.

Core Responsibilities:

1. Photo-text multi-modal understanding: focus on solving core pain points such as photo-text semantic alignment and cross-modal matching deviation, and integrate photo-text visual features, text semantics and other data.

2. Be responsible for the optimization of photo-text relevance and quality, and promote the experience improvement of photo-text in search distribution by combining LLM/VML technologies.

3. Engineering implementation and algorithm performance optimization: be responsible for the engineering implementation of photo-text search algorithm models, complete the full-process optimization of model training, inference and deployment, and ensure the online stability of algorithms.

4. Track cutting-edge technology trends, carry out technical pre-research and innovative practices combined with photo-text search business scenarios, explore in-depth applications in photo-text semantic understanding and relevance matching, form technical precipitation, and improve the technical competitiveness of the team.

Minimum Qualifications

1. Bachelor's degree or above in a computer-related major, with excellent coding ability and a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms.

2. Familiar with and proficient in programming languages such as C++/Python, and familiar with common data structures and programming algorithms.

3. Solid foundation in machine learning and coding ability, strong algorithm design and modeling capabilities, and familiar with at least one of machine learning, data mining, NLP, image processing, multi-modality, and large models.

4. Excellent ability to analyze and solve problems, passionate about solving challenging problems, with good initiative and curiosity, and good communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualification

1. Understanding of the characteristics of photo-text search business, in-depth understanding of image quality evaluation, photo-text relevance judgment, and multi-modal content understanding; priority is given to candidates with experience in content search and photo-text recommendation in information streams.