LLM Research Scientist Graduate (eCommerce Recommendation) - 2025 Start (PhD)

$145,000 - $250,000/Yr

Tiktok - San Jose, CA

Full-time - Entry Level

San Jose, CA

Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services

About the position

The position is for a graduate role at TikTok, focusing on the application of large language models in e-commerce recommendations. The role involves research and development of innovative algorithms to enhance user engagement and satisfaction on the TikTok Shop platform. The successful candidate will work within a team of machine learning engineers and data scientists, contributing to the advancement of recommendation systems and the application of large language models to solve real-world e-commerce challenges.

Responsibilities

• Continuously track and understand the latest research progress of large language models, including pre-training, fine-tuning, instruction fine-tuning, prompt engineering, multimodal large models, etc.
• Actively explore the combined application of large language models and recommendation systems to solve practical problems in recommendation systems, including person-goods matching, commodity governance, interest exploration, commodity understanding, and generative recommendation.
• Cooperate with the infrastructure team to improve the efficiency of large model training, develop large model services, and improve the stability and scalability of training and services.
• Cooperate with scientists in the team to publish research results in top academic conferences and expand the influence of the team.

Requirements

• Obtain a PhD degree with a background in Computer Science, related technical field or equivalent industry experience, with top artificial intelligence conference papers in machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing and other fields.
• Hands-on experience in one or more of the following areas: Large Language Models (LLM), Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, Data Mining, or Natural Language Processing.
• Excellent programming skills, data structure and algorithm skills, proficient in C/C++ or Python programming language.
• Familiar with architecture and implementation of at least one mainstream machine learning programming framework (TensorFlow/PyTorch/MXNet).

Nice-to-haves

• Candidates with awards in ACM/ICPC, NOI/IOI, Top Coder, Kaggle and other competitions are preferred.

Benefits

• 100% premium coverage for employee medical insurance, approximately 75% premium coverage for dependents, and a Health Savings Account (HSA) with a company match.
• Dental, Vision, Short/Long term Disability, Basic Life, Voluntary Life and AD&D insurance plans.
• 10 paid holidays per year plus 17 days of Paid Personal Time Off (PPTO) and 10 paid sick days per year.
• 12 weeks of paid Parental leave and 8 weeks of paid Supplemental Disability.
• Mental and emotional health benefits through EAP and Lyra.
• 401K company match, gym and cellphone service reimbursements.