Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (Global E-Commerce, Recommendation) - 2026 Start (PhD)

Team Introduction

E-commerce at ByteDance is a new and fast-growing business aimed at connecting customers to excellent sellers and quality products through live-streaming, short videos, and commodity recommendations. Our team of applied machine learning engineers and data scientists focuses on E-commerce recommendations, developing innovative algorithms and techniques to improve user engagement and satisfaction, and converting creative ideas into business-impacting solutions. We are keen on applying large-scale machine learning to solve various real-world problems in E-commerce.

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2026. As a graduate, you will have opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth, launching your career where inspiration is infinite at ByteDance.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of 2026. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Responsibilities

• Participate in building large-scale (10 million to 100 million) e-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems, including commodity recommendations, live stream recommendations, short video recommendations etc.
• Build long and short term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of various data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently.
• Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking (e.g., Click Through Rate and Conversion Rate prediction), including, but not limited to building real-time data pipelines, feature engineering, model optimization and innovation.
• Design and build supporting/debugging tools as needed.
• Support the production of scalable and optimised AI/machine learning (ML) models.
• Focus on building algorithms for the extraction, transformation and loading of large volumes of realtime, unstructured data to deploy AI/ML solutions from theoretical data science models.
• Run experiments to test the performance of deployed models, and identifies and resolves bugs that arise in the process.
• Work in a team setting and apply knowledge in statistics, scripting and programming languages required by the firm.
• Work with the relevant software platforms in which the models are deployed.

Minimum Qualifications

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Strong programming and problem-solving ability.
• Experience in applied machine learning, familiar with one or more of the algorithms such as Collaborative Filtering, Matrix Factorization, Factorization Machines, Word2vec, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting Trees, Deep Neural Networks, Wide and Deep etc.
• Experience in Deep Learning Tools such as tensorflow/pytorch.
• Experience with at least one programming language like C++/Python or equivalent.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in recommendation system, online advertising, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, large-scale data mining, or related fields.
• Publications at KDD, NeurlPS, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, RECSYS and related conferences/journals, or experience in data mining/machine learning competitions such as Kaggle/KDD-cup etc.