Research Engineer, Agentic Video Editing - TikTok
TikTok
San Jose, CA · Posted November 13, 2026
Just laid off? Start here: a plan for the first weeks
More in California job market · Research Engineer jobs in California (117) · All Research Engineer jobs (161) · Technology & Software · Engineering jobs
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Where San Jose, CA ranks
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November 2026
- #1Best cities for marketing pay after cost of living$204k · of 16
- #1Best cities for aerospace and defense pay after cost of living$187k · of 19
- #2Best cities for security pay after cost of living$220k · of 10
- #3Best cities for technology pay after cost of living$205k · of 80
- #5Best cities for technology jobs1,449 openings · of 100
- #5Cities with the most jobs that do not need a four-year degree in the West Coast162 jobs · of 47
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing does not state pay. Across 69 open research engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $237,500 to $425,000 and the median is $285,000.
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TikTok has filed one layoff notice in the last twelve months, covering 250 workers, most recently August 2026. These are public filings with state labor departments, and an open role can sit alongside them. See the filings
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About the job
We are building the next generation of AI-native creation tools powered by intelligent AI agents. Our mission is to transform how people create by embedding agentic AI directly into creative workflows—from AI-powered camera effect generation to AI-driven video editing and storytelling.
Our team operates at the intersection of AI research, systems engineering, and creative product development, translating advances in agentic AI into scalable, real-world creation tools used by millions of creators. We work closely with product and design partners to ensure that sophisticated AI systems result in simple, powerful, and intuitive creative experiences.
Responsibilities - Build end-to-end agentic video editing systems, working across the agent harness, backend services, and evaluation pipelines. Own scoped features and improvements from prototyping through production. - Develop and improve the agent harness, including planning, tool use, context management, and error recovery for multimodal editing workflows. - Build reliable backend services for agent execution, session management, and media processing, and improve system latency, cost, and reliability. - Develop evaluation and feedback loops, including LLM judges, benchmarks, and human review workflows, to measure editing quality, diagnose failures, and catch regressions. - Propose new ideas and adapt advances from research and industry into practical experiments, using evaluation results and user feedback to continuously improve agent capabilities and video quality. - Collaborate with research, engineering, and product partners to turn successful experiments into useful editing experiences for creators.
Minimum Qualifications - Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. - Strong programming skills in Python and solid software engineering fundamentals. - Foundational knowledge of machine learning and large language models. - Hands-on experience building an LLM application, AI Agent, or multimodal AI project through coursework, research, internships, or personal projects. - Ability to design experiments, analyze failures, and turn findings into working improvements. - Interest in video creation and building useful tools for creators.
Preferred Qualifications - Experience with tool-use agents, context management, or debugging and improving multi-step agent workflows. - Familiarity with video understanding, audio and visual processing. - Experience with evaluation datasets, human annotation, or model-based evaluation. - Familiarity with video editing tools or media processing libraries such as FFmpeg. - Relevant research, open-source contributions, or projects that demonstrate the ability to build and evaluate AI systems.