Machine Learning Engineer (Local Services), TikTok Search
TikTok, Singapore
About the job
About the team
We are the TikTok Local Service Search team, building search algorithms that power both general search and the local services vertical, connecting user needs with places (POIs), products, and videos. Our users discover restaurants, hotels, and destinations through video content, then turn to search to learn more, compare options, and make decisions. We combine the understanding, generation, and reasoning capabilities of large language models with search and personalization technology, aiming to improve information access, support purchase decisions, and drive transaction efficiency throughout this journey.
What You'll Do
Depending on your experience, you will focus on one or more of the following areas:
- POI Search & NLP Infrastructure
Own query understanding, content understanding, relevance, and POI retrieval, ranking, and result presentation. Leverage LLMs to understand multilingual expressions of places, categories, budgets, and search intents, and extract structured information from videos and location data to power search. Combine semantic retrieval, geolocation signals, and click/conversion prediction to improve the accuracy and relevance of restaurant, hotel, and other search results. Apply these capabilities to the online search pipeline through LLM-based labeling, training data development, model fine-tuning, and distillation, and explore approaches such as generative retrieval.