Applied Scientist, TikTok E-Commerce - Conversational AI, USDS

Applied Scientist, TikTok E-Commerce - Conversational AI, USDS

About the Team:
The future of e-commerce customer service is intelligent, efficient, and AI-driven. Our team is dedicated to replacing traditional human-agent customer service with an advanced AI-powered conversational system that provides instant, intelligent, and seamless support for TikTok's global e-commerce platform. By leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and NLP, we are building an AI customer service system that can understand user queries, resolve disputes, guide transactions, and enhance the overall shopping experience without the need for human intervention. Our cutting-edge AI is designed to handle complex customer interactions, including answering product inquiries, resolving order issues, processing refunds, and assisting sellers with operational tasks. Through LLM post‑training, we ensure that our AI assistant is continuously learning and improving, providing more accurate, context‑aware, and human‑like interactions. By joining us, you will be at the forefront of transforming customer service in e‑commerce, helping build an AI system that understands, adapts, and provides intelligent solutions—all while reducing costs and improving efficiency for merchants and the platform.

What You Will Do

• Develop AI‑Powered Customer Service Systems: Design and implement an AI‑driven conversational customer service agent that can handle e‑commerce inquiries, complaints, refunds, dispute resolutions, and logistical issues, replacing traditional human customer service agents.
• LLM Post‑Training & Data‑Efficient Learning: Apply state‑of‑the‑art LLM post‑training techniques, such as instruction tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and continual learning, to optimize AI customer service responses with minimal labeled data.
• Benchmark and training data construction: Identify challenging customer service interactions, such as policy clarifications, dispute handling, and multi‑turn complaint resolution, and construct specialized datasets to enhance AI training.
• Develop Multilingual Customer Support: Build AI models capable of handling customer service interactions across multiple languages and cultural contexts, ensuring accurate translation and appropriate responses for a diverse global audience.
• Optimize Model Efficiency & Deployment: Work on model compression, quantization, and efficient inference techniques to ensure the AI customer service assistant can run at scale with low latency and high reliability.

Responsibilities

1. Develop AI Customer Support Systems: Build and optimize AI‑driven customer service models capable of handling high‑volume, complex user inquiries while ensuring high response accuracy and reliability.
2. Enhance LLM‑Based Customer Interaction Models: Implement LLM post‑training strategies to improve customer support interactions, reducing errors, hallucinations, and irrelevant responses.
3. Create Automated Dispute Resolution & Policy‑Adaptive AI: Develop intelligent models capable of handling disputes, verifying transaction details, and ensuring platform compliance in automated responses.
4. Develop Multilingual Support & Translation Models: Enhance the platform’s AI translation capabilities for real‑time multilingual customer service interactions, ensuring smooth cross‑language communication.
5. Refine Response Evaluation Metrics: Define and implement quality evaluation metrics for AI‑generated responses to track customer satisfaction and improve conversational AI quality through A/B testing and iterative optimization.
6. Enable AI‑Seller Collaboration: Build AI‑powered seller assistance tools to help merchants quickly respond to customer inquiries, manage store operations, and resolve disputes efficiently.
7. Optimize Large‑Scale Model Deployment: Work on model compression, inference optimization, and edge AI deployment to ensure real‑time, high‑quality customer service experiences at scale.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field
• 3+ working experience in one of the following fields: machine learning, NLP, and computer vision
• Experience with software development in at least one of the following programming languages: C++, Python, Go, Java

Preferred Qualifications:

• LLM Development & Post‑Training Expertise: Experience in fine‑tuning, distillation, or reinforcement learning of large language models for conversational AI applications.
• Multilingual AI Development: Proficiency in multilingual NLP, machine translation, and cross‑lingual dialogue modeling.
• E‑commerce Business Acumen: Understanding of e‑commerce policies, dispute resolution workflows, and merchant‑buyer interactions to enhance AI service design.
• Advanced NLP & Deep Learning: Strong grasp of AI agents, retrieval‑augmented generation, mixture of experts, sparse attention, reinforcement learning, inference time scaling, etc. for improving AI dialogue quality.
• Scalability & Efficiency: Experience in distributed model training, low‑latency inference, and edge AI for large‑scale customer service applications.

This role requires the ability to work with and support systems designed to protect sensitive data and information. As such, this role will be subject to strict national security‑related screening.

About USDS

TikTok is the leading destination for short‑form mobile video. Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. U.S. Data Security (“USDS”) is a subsidiary of TikTok in the U.S. This new, security‑first division was created to bring heightened focus and governance to our data protection policies and content assurance protocols to keep U.S. users safe. Our focus is on providing oversight and protection of the TikTok platform and U.S. user data, so millions of Americans can continue turning to TikTok to learn something new, earn a living, express themselves creatively, or be entertained. The teams within USDS that deliver on this commitment daily span across Trust & Safety, Security & Privacy, Engineering, User & Product Ops, Corporate Functions and more.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect—and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy—a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an “Always Day 1” mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

Reasonable Accommodation

USDS is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at

Compensation and Benefits

Compensation for this position: base salary range $129,960 - $246,240 annually. Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance; a 401(k) savings plan with company match; paid parental leave; short‑term and long‑term disability coverage; life insurance; wellbeing benefits; among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of paid personal time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure). Equity and bonus may be available as part of the total compensation package.

Seniority Level

Mid‑Senior level

Employment Type

Full‑time

Job Function

Research, Analyst, and Information Technology

Industries

Software Development