Research Scientist Graduate, LLM Applications (TikTok Video Recommendation) - 2025 Start (PhD)

Responsibilities

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 its offices include New York, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, 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.

We are a pioneering Machine Learning Engineering team at TikTok, committed to spearheading innovation in leveraging cutting-edge technologies in foundation models (eg. Large Language Models, LLM) to enhance TikTok's experience. The mission of our team is to bridge the gap between state-of-the-art AI techniques and seamless user experience. Our team culture cherishes the "First Principles Thinking" approach, and we deeply value understanding things at their core and focusing on delivering solid, well-grounded solutions.

We are looking for talented research scientists to join our team in 2025, who are excited about growing their business understanding, building scalable and high-performance models and systems, and partnering across disciplines with global teams, in pursuit of excellence.

Responsibilities
1. Deploy, prompt, and optimize cutting-edge foundation models (eg. Large Language Models, LLM).
2. Apply foundation models to enhance and optimize TikTok's recommendation system and product offerings, improving the experience of billion-scale consumers and creators.
3. Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product managers, data scientists, and product engineers, to form and solve problems, refine machine learning algorithms, and communicate results.
4. Regularly run A/B tests, perform analyses, and iterate algorithms based on results.
5. Work with infrastructure teams on improving the efficiency and stability of machine learning systems.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:
1. PhD degree in the field of computer science or a related technical discipline
2. Hands-on experience in one or more of the following areas: Large Language Models (LLM), Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, Data Mining, or Natural Language Processing
3. Strong programming skills in Python and/or C/C++, and a deep understanding of data structures and algorithms
4. Familiar with architecture and implementation of at least one mainstream machine learning programming framework (TensorFlow/PyTorch/MXNet)
5. Excellent communication and teamwork skills, and a passion for learning new techniques and tackling challenging problems

Preferred Qualifications:
1. Prior research/industry experience with deploying, prompting, and fine-tuning foundation models
2. Prior research/industry experience with applied machine learning, or large-scale recommendation systems
3. Publications at major AI-related conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, KDD, ICDM, SDM, RecSys, or simply on arXiv but with large impact
4. Strong track record in AI-related competitions, or participation in public/open-source AI-related projects of high visibility

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

By submitting an application for this role, you accept and agree to our global applicant privacy policy, which may be accessed here: https://careers.tiktok.com/legal/privacy.