TikTok
Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (E-Commerce Recommendation/Search Alliance) - 2027 Start (PhD)
Seattle, Washington · Full-time · Posted Oct 28, 2026
- Education
- PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Operations Research, or a related discipline.
About the job
Build machine-learning systems for TikTok Shop, including personalized product recommendations, search and ranking, and AI tools that help merchants and creators grow their businesses.
What you'll do
- Design and build large-scale recommendation and ranking algorithms for real-time product recommendations.
- Develop AI-powered merchant tools and agents, applying LLMs, NLP, and multimodal machine learning to affiliate operations and business growth.
- Work with cross-functional teams to prototype, productionize, and deploy AI solutions, including agents that automate algorithm development workflows.
What they ask for
- Completing or recently completed a PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Operations Research, or a related discipline.
- Thorough understanding of data structures and algorithms and strong problem-solving ability.
- Deep understanding of machine learning, statistics, scaling distributed computing, and big data engineering.
Nice to have
- Software engineering experience through internships, employment, coding competitions, or publications.
- Internship or research experience, especially in e-commerce, recommendation, or search engines; publications at the listed conferences are also welcomed.
Tools
LLMs, NLP
AI focus
Develop recommendation, search, and ranking systems; AI-powered merchant operation systems and AI agents; and ML agents that automate algorithm development workflows.
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