Senior Machine Learning Engineer, TikTok Branding Ads

multimodal semantic understanding, content matching and ranking, and cross-modal alignment.

Key technical directions:

• Multimodal-LLM model development
• Generative retrieval & ranking technology
• Ads ranking
• LLM inference opptimization

We are looking for sophisticated engineers that have strong problem solving skills and algorithm understanding to build and manage systems with high performance, scalability, and availability. You will have the opportunity to partner closely with a globalized engineering and product teams in a high-impact and fast-paced environment.

What you'll do:

• Use large video models to model the semantic meaning of video content and construct structured vector representations.
• Build multimodal representations of brand ads (video/picture + title/script + brand semantics, etc.) to achieve cross-modal alignment.
• Implement an efficient large-scale video content indexing and retrieval system to support vector-level matching and filtering between ad semantics and millions of native videos.
• Set up content understanding pipelines for various business scenarios, processing tens of millions of videos daily.
• Apply technologies such as Embedding Distillation and Hard Negative Mining to optimize the training process.
• Integrate large model inference services and design of multi-channel recall service architectures (supporting multimodal + multi-stage inference).
• Design of incremental update, cache acceleration, and offline synchronization mechanisms for multimodal pipelines.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:
• BS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or other relevant majors, with 5+ years of related work experience
• Excellent programming, debugging, and optimization skills in one or more general purpose programming languages including but not limited to: Go, C/C++, Python.
• Ability to think critically and to formulate solutions to problems in a clear and concise way.
• Relevant professional experience with machine learning, data mining, data analysis, distribution system
• Good understanding in one of the following domains: brand ads, content ads, auction, bidding, ranking, and ads forecasting.
• Experience with one or more of the following: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, NLP, ranking systems, recommendation systems, backend, large-scale systems, data science, full-stack
• Good product sense and experience designing and implementing product features.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Possess strong technical background/experience in NLP, LLM, search/advertising/recommendation systems, etc.
• Have a strong passion for large language models.
• Publications in top-tier conferences and experience in video understanding-related projects.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $194000 - $355000 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.