Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (-Data-Search-Search Quality) - 2027 Start (PhD

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@2026 Tik Tok

Technology

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A221713A

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Responsibilities

Our Search Engineering Team is responsible for building and owning Tik Tok's search engine which can provide our users with the best search experience. In Tik Tok Search Team, you'll have the opportunity to build full-stack search engine system and combine information retrieval technology with modern machine learning methods from related fields such as NLP, CV, and recommender system. We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving.

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

This full-time PhD Graduate role provides early-career researchers and engineers the opportunity to join one of our engineering teams where you will have the opportunity to: possible directions include:

• - Content understanding:
  Applying the industry's 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 Tik Tok search.
• - User Behavior Modeling: solving the recommendation problem in search, let Tik Tok search increase the ability of personalization on the basis of "relevant", and understand users better.
• - Video understanding: comprehensive use of NLP, CV, as well as LLM for better video understanding from the perspective of the video itself and social network, improve authority, credibility, and usefulness of search results.
• - Search research and evaluation: developing new retrieval, ranking, relevance evaluation, query understanding, multimodal search, or LLM application methods and translating research ideas into scalable product improvements.

Qualifications

• Minimum Qualifications-Individuals currently pursuing or recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Statistics, or a related technical field.
• Must have graduated with an applicable degree before onboarding.
• Research or practical experience in one or more areas: search, information retrieval, ranking, recommendation systems, natural language processing, multimodal learning, large language models, data mining, or machine learning systems.
• Preferred Qualifications
  - Publications, preprints, patents, open-source contributions, or research projects in search, recommendation, NLP, information retrieval, machine learning, or related areas.
• Experience with large-scale retrieval, ranking, model training, evaluation, online experimentation, distributed systems, or production ML systems.
• Familiarity with relevance evaluation, query understanding, semantic retrieval, vector search, LLM applications, or multimodal search.
• Ability to define ambiguous technical problems, compare solution paths, and communicate trade-offs clearly.
• Interest in applying research to improve search quality, user experience, and product impact at global scale.
• As a condition of employment, all successful candidates must be able to establish authorization to work in the United States.
• For this position, the Company does not provide sponsorship or any immigration-related benefits.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $162000 - $316800 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for…