Senior Machine Learning Engineer - USDS Shop Ads

Responsibilities

The Tik Tok USDS shop Ads team is dedicated to blending advertiser focus with technical expertise. Our mission is to enhance shop ads—both open-loop and closed-loop—to establish Tik Tok US as an essential growth engine for businesses of all sizes and a top destination for consumers to discover and buy products, content, and services. We are crucial to driving Tik Tok's ad revenue and are committed to developing the next-generation shop ad solutions for the platform.

• Build highly scalable machine learning systems and state-of-the-art machine learning models to improve ad ranking quality and optimize advertisers' marketing strategies. Examples include but are not limited to click through rate prediction, conversion rate prediction, intelligent format selection and user journey optimization.
• Explore, develop and experiment with new features to improve model accuracy.
• Understand ads platform objectives and take full advantage of modern machine learning to improve ads relevance, quality, and quantity delivered to end-users.
• Collaborate with Global counterpart, Product Managers, Designers, and other disciplines to explore the next generation of shopping experiences on Tik Tok.

• Highly self-motivated to drive business growth and foster technical advancement.
• Proficient in using SQL and Python and experience with data manipulation.
• Experience with big data processing frameworks (e.g., Hadoop, Spark) and distributed computing for efficient data mining on large-scale datasets.
• Solid understanding of machine/deep learning concepts and techniques, including feature engineering, model evaluation, and optimization.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a demonstrated ability to handle and derive insights from complex and unstructured datasets.

• Master's or advanced degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, or a related field.
• 5+ years experience as a Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, and experience in causal machine learning is preferred.
• Work experience in user growth, marketing algorithms, recommendation algorithms, advertisement algorithms or related fields is preferred.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in cross-functional teams and convey technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Tik Tok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm.

We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision‑making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.

On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in‑person schedule up to 5 days a week.

Inspiring creativity is at the core of Tik Tok'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…