Job description

The TikTok Content Ecology team builds the core algorithm systems for content understanding and ecosystem governance on TikTok. Drawing on platform-scale video content and interaction signals, we apply multimodal large models, natural language processing, computer vision, and recommendation systems to build a content foundation platform supporting search, local services, product infrastructure, PGC, and UGC across TikTok's global business. Our work spans three areas: 1. Unified content understanding. We use multimodal large models for fine-grained semantic parsing of video, building a cross-category, multilingual labeling and event knowledge system that provides reliable foundations for search, recommendation, and safety. 2. Platform-level content governance. We develop high-precision recognition and review models that handle billions of pieces of content daily, addressing low-quality and non-compliant material and supporting compliance requirements for goods and content in areas such as local services. 3. Business growth and user experience. Through trending discovery, inspiration recommendations, and intelligent customer service, we serve creators and users worldwide, improving distribution efficiency, the precision of creative recommendations, and the speed of customer service response. We work on understanding hundreds of languages and processing multimodal data at hundred-billion scale, in a global business that keeps growing. You will apply NLP, multimodal, and large model technology at real-world scale, seeing your work reach hundreds of millions of users. About the Team The Content Ecology Algorithm Team drives TikTok's AI innovations in LLMs/MLLMs, NLP, Computer Vision, Multimodal learning, Agentic AI, and recommendation algorithms. We develop cutting-edge AI capabilities that power multiple business lines. You will tackle unique algorithm challenges in building products for a global audience. Our platform's diverse content and worldwide user base create a wealth of opportunities for AI applications. With rapidly growing businesses such as TikTok Local Services, you'll have the chance to bring cutting-edge AI innovations into real-world production. Responsibilities - Drive the research and development of core algorithms for TikTok Local Services, leveraging LLMs/MLLMs, Agentic AI, NLP, Computer Vision, conversion modeling, global optimization, and causal uplift modeling. - Develop deep semantic representations and structured models of content, products, and user intent, while building foundational capabilities across product knowledge graphs, intent understanding, and end-to-end intelligent transaction optimization. - Continuously enhance both supply- and demand-side experiences to drive sustainable growth in transaction conversion. - Tackle frontier technical challenges unique to local services, including multilingual and multimodal understanding, highly dynamic environments, and long-horizon sequential decision-making. - Stay at the forefront of research, translate state-of-the-art advances into production-grade solutions, scale proven innovations, and establish reusable algorithmic foundations with broad applicability. Minimum Qualifications - Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering or a related technical field. - Strong foundations in machine learning and deep learning, with a solid understanding of Transformer architectures, LLMs, multimodal large language models, and modern representation learning techniques. - Experience in one or more relevant areas, such as NLP, computer vision, multimodal understanding, AI agents, knowledge graphs, retrieval and recommendation, conversion modeling, causal uplift modeling, or decision optimization. - Hands-on experience with Python, PyTorch, distributed model training, and large-scale data processing, with strong algorithmic, software engineering, and production deployment capabilities. - Proven ability to formulate and solve complex, ambiguous problems, translate research advances into scalable production solutions, and deliver measurable business impact. - Strong cross-functional collaboration and communication skills, with a track record of driving technically complex projects to high-quality execution. Preferred Qualifications: - Experience building large-scale machine learning systems for e-commerce, recommendation, search, advertising, marketplaces or other transaction-oriented products. - Experience working with multilingual, multimodal, or highly dynamic data and deploying models in large-scale production environments. - Publications at leading conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, KDD, WWW, SIGIR, RecSys, AAAI, Interspeech, or ICASSP. - Demonstrated technical leadership through driving cross-functional initiatives, establishing reusable algorithmic capabilities, or mentoring engineers and researchers.

Requirements

Must-haves

About the Team
Drive the research and development of core algorithms for TikTok Local Services, leveraging LLMs/MLLMs, Agentic AI, NLP, Computer Vision, conversion modeling, global optimization, and causal uplift modeling.
Continuously enhance both supply- and demand-side experiences to drive sustainable growth in transaction conversion.
Tackle frontier technical challenges unique to local services, including multilingual and multimodal understanding, highly dynamic environments, and long-horizon sequential decision-making.
Stay at the forefront of research, translate state-of-the-art advances into production-grade solutions, scale proven innovations, and establish reusable algorithmic foundations with broad applicability.
Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering or a related technical field.
Strong foundations in machine learning and deep learning, with a solid understanding of Transformer architectures, LLMs, multimodal large language models, and modern representation learning techniques.
Hands-on experience with Python, PyTorch, distributed model training, and large-scale data processing, with strong algorithmic, software engineering, and production deployment capabilities.
Proven ability to formulate and solve complex, ambiguous problems, translate research advances into scalable production solutions, and deliver measurable business impact.
Strong cross-functional collaboration and communication skills, with a track record of driving technically complex projects to high-quality execution.

Nice-to-haves

Experience building large-scale machine learning systems for e-commerce, recommendation, search, advertising, marketplaces or other transaction-oriented products.
Experience working with multilingual, multimodal, or highly dynamic data and deploying models in large-scale production environments.
Publications at leading conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, KDD, WWW, SIGIR, RecSys, AAAI, Interspeech, or ICASSP.
Demonstrated technical leadership through driving cross-functional initiatives, establishing reusable algorithmic capabilities, or mentoring engineers and researchers.

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Keywords to mirror

aimachine learningpython

Platform: tiktok
Effort: medium

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