Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (TikTok Shop Global E-Commerce, Search) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Team Introduction
The Search E-Commerce team is responsible for the search algorithm for TikTok's rapidly growing global e-commerce business. We use state-of-the-art large-scale machine learning technology, the cutting-edge NLP, CV and multi-modal technology to build the industry's top-class search engine to provide the best e-commerce search experience, for more than 1 billion monthly TikTok users around the world. Our mission is to build a world where "there is no hard-to-sell good-priced product in the world".

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2026. 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 TikTok.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by end of year 2026. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Candidates can apply to a maximum of two positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you apply. The application limit is applicable to TikTok and its affiliates' jobs globally. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early.

Responsibilities
• Improve the basic search quality and user experience: Optimize query analysis and text relevance matching. Understand e-commerce video content and implement multi-modal matching. Improve users' perception of product authority, and deeply participate in the design and implementation of core search products. Comprehensively improve the end-to-end shopping experience from browsing to after-sales.
• Design and implement the end-to-end ranking system (recall, first stage ranking, final stage ranking and mixed row): Improve users' personalized shopping interests model. Improve the shopping conversion efficiency for merchandise, video and live stream to promote GMV growth.
• Promote the development of the ecosystem: From the perspective of the industry and businesses, solve challenging problems such as supply and demand matching, business cold start, and sustainable business growth, etc. Think, analyze and adjust the evolution of the system to achieve long-term and sustainable growth of GMV.
• Work in a team setting and apply knowledge in statistics, scripting and programming languages required by the firm.
• Work with the relevant software platforms in which the models are deployed.