Research Engineer, Generative AI Model Optimization

Responsibilities

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok has global offices including Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Singapore, 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.
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.

Team Introduction
The AI Platform team is a team focusing on building advanced end-to-end production pipelines with core technologies including generative AI, intelligent editing and content understanding. By utilizing AI model training, optimization, deployment and applications, we provide cutting-edge AI capabilities to empower content creation and consumption on TikTok and serve billions of users.

We are looking for strong research engineers to design and develop state-of-the-art generative AI model optimization systems and solutions. The primary goal is to reduce the cost of generative AI applications while preserving quality and efficiency.

Responsibilities
- Design and develop state-of-the-art optimization framework and solutions for generative AI model training and inference, utilize techniques including but not limited to parallelism, quantization, distillation and so on.
- Research and develop cutting-edge distributed model training and inference optimization technologies, such as data parallelism, model parallelism etc.
- Communicate and collaborate with cross-functional teams to clarify model performance requirements under different use cases, make reasonable trade-offs to provide the most cost-efficient model optimization solutions to TikTok product teams to support content creation and consumption.
- Built platforms and tools that standardize common optimization methods to enlarge the usability of model optimization technologies among internal developers and researchers.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications
- M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related fields with 3-5 years of experience in software development.
- Proficient in one or more programming languages, such as Python, C, or C++. Familiar with common data structures and basic algorithms.
- Deep knowledge in machine learning optimizations such as quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, Neural Architecture Search (NAS), and optimizations for large models.
- Familiar with one or more open-source deep learning frameworks, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, PaddlePaddle etc. Understand the underlying design of the framework, familiar with common model architectures.

Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in AutoML algorithms or model acceleration technologies.
- Experience in contributing to open-source projects is preferred.
- Ability to work collaboratively with global stakeholders

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.