Research Scientist - LLM Applications on Search/Ads/Recommendation - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2027. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at our Company. Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by end of year 2027. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Team Introduction: As the Data-Arch team, we serve as a dynamic and innovative pillar of TikTok's ecosystem, dedicated to bridging the gap between users and high-quality products. Our team is responsible for the end-to-end design, development, and optimization of the recommendation infrastructure that powers our global e-commerce and content platforms. By building robust, scalable architectures, we ensure a stable and seamless user experience, even under the most demanding loads. Comprised of specialized experts focused on various facets of system health and efficiency, we work collectively to refine the recommendation systems that define the TikTok experience, ensuring every interaction is both reliable and personalized.

Topic Content: As business scenarios become increasingly complex, search, advertising, and recommendation are facing significant challenges. While large models can accurately capture user preferences and enhance personalization as well as content quality, they also impose stringent requirements on real-time performance, stability, and scalability. This introduces substantial technical challenges in areas such as distributed training, inference acceleration, heterogeneous hardware utilization, and multimodal data processing. At the same time, the rapid growth in model scale and the proliferation of multimodal data have made it difficult for existing infrastructure to meet the demands of data processing efficiency and resource utilization. This topic focuses on system and engineering innovations to overcome key technical bottlenecks and build efficient, stable, and scalable large-model solutions, providing a robust technical foundation for search, advertising, and recommendation scenarios.

Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain high performance online services for TikTok recommendation and search system to support various types of products, such as For You Feed, E-commerce, Social, etc.
• Build extremely efficient and reliable data pipelines for candidates generation, profile generation, training examples generation, realtime online training, etc;
• Build globalized large-scale recommendation system;
• Design and develop high performance computing frameworks and storage systems. Minimum Qualification(s):
• Individuals who are completing or recently completed a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Research background in ML/AI, with a focus on inference optimization, model acceleration, or efficient ML systems.
• Experience in programming, included but not limited to, the following programming languages: C, C++, Java or Python.
• Problem-solving skills, self-driven learning mindset, and effective communication.

Preferred Qualification(s):

• Demonstrated ability to translate research into practical system implementations.
• Experience (academic or practical) in areas such as advertising or recommendation systems, search, distributed systems, or big data processing.