Senior Research Engineer, TikTok AI Search (LLM Pretraining/Alignment/Inference) Senior Research Engineer, TikTok AI Search (LLM Pretraining/Alignment/Inference)

About the Role

Key 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
• Use 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 a better search experience for users

Requirements

• Bachelor or advanced degree in computer science or a related technical discipline
• Effective communication and teamwork skills
• Proficient coding skills and strong algorithm & data structure basis

Nice to Have

• 5+ years of related industry experience
• Experience in NLP, LLM, RL
• Experience in using data-driven methods to enhance LLM capabilities through various stages of development
• Experience in RAG, Prompt Engineering or other inference time methods to enhance system performance
• Candidates with top-tier conference papers (ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ICRA, KDD), relevant internship experience, or winners of ACM competitions

Qualifications

• Educational background in computer science or related field
• Experience with algorithms and data structures
• Effective communication and teamwork skills

Benefits & Perks

• Base salary range of $194,000 - $355,000 annually, with potential bonuses, incentives, and stock units
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance from day one
• 401(k) savings plan with company match
• Paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance
• Wellbeing benefits, 10 paid holidays, 10 paid sick days, 17 days of Paid Personal Time
• Hybrid work environment and access to counseling services and Headspace subscription