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Tech Lead Manager, Research Engineer, TikTok AI Search (LLM Pretraining/Alignment/Inference)

TikTok
San Jose, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 8 Jul 2025

About the role

About the team

On the TikTok Search Team, you will have the opportunity to develop and apply cutting edge machine learning technologies in real-time large-scale systems, which serve billions of search requests every day. Via advanced NLP and multi-modal models, our projects impact and improve the search experience for hundreds of millions of users globally. We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving.



The main job directions include:

1. Exploring and developing large-scale language models and optimizing enterprise applications to the extreme;

2. Data construction, instruction tuning, preference alignment, and model optimization;

3. Implementation of relevant applications, including content generation, summary etc.;

4. Collaborating with cross-functional teams to produce and apply new science to more responsibly develop and deploy large language models

5. In-depth research and exploration of more usage scenarios in future life.



Responsibilities:

- Conduct research and develop state-of-the-art algorithms in various stages of the development of LLM, including continued pretraining, SFT, RLHF;

- Investigate and implement robust evaluation methodologies to assess model performance at various stages, unravel the underlying mechanisms and sources of their abilities, and utilize this understanding to drive model improvements.

- Using inference stage techniques such as RAG, CoT, Prompt Engineering to improve the model output

- Improve the performance of AI Search in the TikTok app to provide better search experience for users

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Company

TikTok

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