Tech Lead Generative AI Architect - Creative Tools, Ads Creative & Ecosystem

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.

A "creative" is the ad (in the form of a short-form video) served to TikTok users, composed of video, background music, call-to-action card, post-click landing page, and other formats that get delivered to users. A quote goes "creativity is the soul of advertising", because a good ad creative is effective, yet difficult to produce, especially at the scale of TikTok advertising.

TikTok Ads Creative & Ecosystem team tackles the challenge of creating engaging and effective ad creatives at scale. Our mission is to build cutting-edge tech solutions for ad understanding, production, and optimization, empowering advertisers, creators, and partners to deliver the best creative experiences.

The team is building platforms to provide in-depth and unique AI-driven data insights to provide creative guidance to advertisers, which is the key for their ads planning and iteration. We are looking for an engineer leader with strong data application background to join our fast growing team. The engineer leader will lead the team to focus on creative insights direction, grow business understanding, build highly scalable and reliable software/infrastructure, partner across functions with global teams, and make big impacts. If you are someone who welcomes challenges, we are eager to have you on the team!

Responsibilities:
- Be responsible for the architecture and technical decisions for the AI pipelines and model orchestration powering creative tools and workflows.
- Bring the best in class ML solutions to our creative products to ensure outputs of high quality that can be used as ad creatives on TikTok.
- Drive innovation in creative features across TikTok monetization surfaces like Symphony Creative Studio, TikTok Ads Manager, Business Center, etc.
- Play a hands-on role in ensuring we deliver high quality and performant ML inference pipelines for generative video, audio, text and assistant based features.
- Work closely with the engineering teams to ensure the AI services are reliable and performant with high GPU utilization.
- Partner with various cross-functional teams on ensuring harm and bias prevention and mitigation in our AI pipelines.
- Help develop the team culture around excellence in distributed AI inference architecture and modular model orchestration.
- Ensure that pipelines and services are built with a strong focus on the feedback loop for continuous improvement.
- Prototype and scale promising models with breakneck speed, iterating rapidly to achieve record-breaking results.
- Dive deep into the latest techniques for video/image generation, temporal consistency, and controllable generation, pioneering new approaches that set a new standard for creative tooling.
- Implement and experiment with state-of-the-art architectures like diffusion, DiT, GANs, VAEs, and Transformers, adapting them to push the boundaries of video/image generation and editing.
- Thought Leadership - Evangelize and share best practices through forums such as blogs, whitepapers, reference architectures and public-speaking events.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:
- PhD or Masters in Computer Science / Machine Learning / Electrical Engineering or related field with 5+ years of industry experience along with 4+ years in technical lead/architect roles.
- Extensive knowledge of state-of-the-art generative architectures and their applications in video/image generation and controllable generation. Deep understanding of inference optimizations, sampling algorithms, distillation, model pruning etc.
- Mastery of deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch, with the ability to optimize performance and scalability at every level of the stack. Exceptional coding skills in Python and/or C++, with a deep understanding of software engineering best practices.
- Proven ability to implement and experiment with cutting-edge research papers, adapting techniques to novel problem domains.

Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience working on creative products or tools for image/video creation and editing is highly preferred.
- Research history in at least one of these: (i) generative AI, (ii) reinforcement learning, (iii) video understanding, (iv) multimodal generation/understanding is preferred.
- Research experience with modern generative technologies like Diffusion, DiT, GANs, etc. is preferred.
- Knowledge of multimodal learning (CLIP, BLIP, etc.) and a good understanding of advanced learning techniques.
- Prior publications in top-tier conferences is preferred.

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