Senior Machine Learning Engineer, E-commerce Feed Recommendation

$194,000 - $355,000/Yr

Tiktok - San Jose, CA

Full-time - Senior

San Jose, CA

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

About the position

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer focused on E-commerce Feed Recommendation at TikTok, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our interest-based E-commerce platform. This position is integral to connecting customers with high-quality products through personalized recommendations, leveraging the power of machine learning and data analytics. TikTok Shop is not just another E-commerce platform; it offers a unique shopping experience through live-streaming and short videos, making the recommendation system crucial for enhancing user engagement and satisfaction. In this role, you will participate in the development of large-scale recommendation algorithms and systems that cater to millions of users. Your responsibilities will include designing, developing, and iterating on predictive models that drive candidate generation and ranking, such as Click Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate predictions. You will work with real-time data pipelines, engage in feature engineering, and optimize models to ensure they meet the dynamic needs of our users. You will also be tasked with building user interest models that analyze vast amounts of data to uncover latent interests, thereby improving the shopping experience. This involves addressing various e-commerce challenges, including the cold start problem and effective traffic allocation. Additionally, you will design and develop tools to support and debug the systems you create, ensuring they operate smoothly and efficiently. At TikTok, we believe in the power of creativity and collaboration. You will be part of a team of applied machine learning engineers and research scientists dedicated to innovating and improving our E-commerce offerings. Your work will directly impact how users interact with our platform, making it an exciting opportunity to contribute to a rapidly growing area of our business.

Responsibilities

• Participate in building large-scale (10 million to 100 million) live-streaming and short video e-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems on TikTok.
• Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking, including building real-time data pipelines, feature engineering, model optimization and innovation.
• Build long and short term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of various data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently.
• Design and develop various strategies using ML technology to improve user shopping experience, and resolve e-commerce business challenges, such as the cold start problem and traffic allocation.
• Design and build supporting/debugging tools as needed.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related fields.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• 3 years of experience in applied machine learning, familiar with one or more of the algorithms such as Collaborative Filtering, Matrix Factorization, Factorization Machines, Word2vec, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting Trees, Deep Neural Networks, Wide and Deep etc.
• Experience in Deep Learning Tools such as TensorFlow/PyTorch.
• Experience with at least one programming language like C++/Python or equivalent.

Nice-to-haves

• 3 years of experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.
• Publications at KDD, NeurIPS, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, RECSYS and related conferences/journals, or experience in data mining/machine learning competitions such as Kaggle/KDD-cup etc.

Benefits

• 100% premium coverage for employee medical insurance, approximately 75% premium coverage for dependents.
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with a company match.
• Dental, Vision, Short/Long term Disability, Basic Life, Voluntary Life and AD&D insurance plans.
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) Options like Health Care, Limited Purpose and Dependent Care.
• 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.