Senior Machine Learning Engineer (NLP/Multimodal) - E-commerce - Seattle

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 imagination 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.

E-commerce is a new and fast growing business that aims at connecting all customers to excellent sellers and quality products on TikTok Shop, through E-commerce live-streaming, E-commerce short videos, and commodity recommendation. We are a group of applied machine learning engineers and data scientists that focus on E-commerce recommendations. We are developing innovative algorithms and techniques to improve user engagement and satisfaction, converting creative ideas into business-impacting solutions. We are interested and excited about applying large scale machine learning to solve various real-world problems in E-commerce.

What You Will Do
Responsible for the NLP-related design and development, mainly including:
1. Building the intent classifier in a full-stack manner by designing taxonomy, creating and managing high quality labeled data, training the best performed machine learning model (like Bert, GPT), and monitoring the online performance of the model.
2. Building the prediction model by mapping the shopping journey of our users to chatbot actions, including suggesting common question-answers and transferring the user to human agent, with cutting-edge prediction models (like Boosting, deep CTR).
3. Building the generation model by understanding business requests, exploring proper instructions, developing high-quality data, and finetuning a language model of billions of parameters (e.g., 13B, 60B).
4. Working closely with our product and operation teams to quantitatively understand the impact of our chatbot and continuously bridge the business improvement action to model optimization action.

Qualifications

1. Bachelor's degree or above in computer science or related field
2. Solid coding skills, ability to develop in a Linux environment, proficient in Python, Go, or C++
3. 5+ years of experience with solid foundation in data structures/algorithms, proficient in machine learning/deep learning theory, and rich practical experience
4. Familiar with 1-2 areas in natural language processing, computer vision, multimodal, graph algorithms, search algorithms, text/data mining, and LLM
5. Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, passionate about challenging problems
6. Good team spirit and strong communication skills

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 reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at [email protected].

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $175750 - $266000 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 Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. Exercising sound judgment.