Machine Learning Engineer - TikTok-Data-Search-Visual Search
TikTok
San Jose, CA · Posted November 13, 2026
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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
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- #3Best cities for technology pay after cost of living$205k · of 80
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Rankings about data & analytics jobs
- Best cities for data and analytics jobs #1 New York (1,713 openings)
- Best cities for data and analytics pay after cost of living #1 Foster ($232k)
- Most requested AI skills in data and analytics jobs #1 Machine learning engineering (17.1%)
- AI tools named most often in data and analytics jobs #1 Databricks (7.6%)
- Employers with the most data and analytics jobs #1 Amazon (711 roles)
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Pay compared with the market
This listing does not state pay. Across 60 open machine learning engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $174,000 to $266,000 and the median is $210,500.
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Machine Learning Engineer salaries by state · Check your own pay
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
About the Team On the TikTok 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.
Responsibilities • Participate in the improvement of the search core algorithm, possible directions include: • Content understanding/matching: Applying the industry's cutting-edge NLP and CV technology to match the most relevant videos for each search query, and continuously improve the relevance of TikTok search. • User Behavior Modeling: solving the recommendation problem in search, let TikTok search increase the ability of personalization on the basis of "relevant", and understand users better. • Video understanding: comprehensive use of NLP, CV, and other technologies for better video understanding from the perspective of the video itself and social network, improve the authority, credibility, and usefulness of search results. • And More!
Minimum Qualifications: • 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.
Preferred Qualifications: • 3+ years of related industry experience. • Experience in one or more of the following areas is preferred: NLP, Ranking, Ads, search engine, recommender system, distributed system, and machine learning.