Tech Lead, TikTok AI Search (LLM Pretraining/Alignment/Inference) - USDS

About the team
On the TikTok USDS 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