Research Scientist Graduate (Global E-commerce Content Recommendation) - 2026 Start (PhD)

TikTok
San Jose, California

About the job

Global E-Commerce Content Recommendation team plays a central role in the company, driving critical product decisions and platform growth. The team is made up of machine learning researchers and engineers, who support and innovate on production recommendation models and drive product impact. The team is fast-pacing, collaborative and impact-driven. In today’s content-driven commerce landscape, traditional collaborative filtering and supervised learning methods are no longer sufficient. We’re actively exploring how large language models (LLMs) and generative AI can fundamentally transform the recommendation process: from retrieval to ranking, and from static listings to dynamic, generative user-item interactions.

Responsibilities

Design algorithms and systems that leverage LLMs and generative models for content-to-commerce matching, product summarization, etc

Explore novel architectures and strategies for generative recommendation systems

Contribute to the research community via internal papers, patents, or external publications

Drive scientific rigor while balancing real-world constraints

Qualifications

Minimum

Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related technical field

Experience with LLMs (e.g., GPT, LLaMA, PaLM) or diffusion/generative models, through research or practical application

Proficient coding skills in Python and hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch

Demonstrated ability to conduct rigorous research and analyze large-scale data

Strong problem-solving skills and a high sense of ownership

Preferred

Publications in ML/AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, SIGIR, KDD, CVPR, RecSys)

Experience with recommendation systems, retrieval models, or multi-modal learning

Familiarity with building and deploying real-time, scalable ML systems in production

Background in e-commerce or related applied AI research domains