Machine Learning Engineer, TikTok Brand Ads
TikTok
San Jose, CA · Posted November 13, 2026
Just laid off? Start here: a plan for the first weeks
More in California job market · Machine Learning Engineer jobs in San Jose, CA (37) · All Machine Learning Engineer jobs (217) · Technology & Software · Data & Analytics jobs
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Where San Jose, CA ranks
Where San Jose, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
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 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 48 open machine learning engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $167,500 to $239,500 and the median is $199,000.
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Machine Learning Engineer salaries by state · Check your own pay
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among computer occupations, all other, AI is already used for a large share of the tasks. Measured exposure for computer occupations, all other: 31% (high).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
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
TikTok Brand Ads team is responsible for the complete technical chain from data construction, model training, offline evaluation, online deployment, inference optimization to new model exploration, covering key tasks such as multimodal semantic understanding, content matching and ranking, and cross-modal alignment.
We are looking for passionate engineers that have strong problem solving skills and algorithm understanding to build and manage systems with high performance, scalability, and availability. You will have the opportunity to partner closely with a globalized engineering and product teams in a high-impact and fast-paced environment.
What you'll do: - Develop and optimize the entire advertising ranking funnel—including retrieval (candidate generation), coarse-ranking, and fine-ranking models. - Apply state-of-the-art deep learning and recommendation algorithms to improve ad relevance and performance. - Implement an efficient large-scale video content indexing and retrieval system to support vector-level matching and filtering between ad semantics and millions of native videos. - Set up content understanding pipelines for various business scenarios, processing tens of millions of videos daily. - Apply technologies such as Embedding Distillation and Hard Negative Mining to optimize the training process.
Minimum Qualifications: - BS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or other relevant majors. - Excellent programming, debugging, and optimization skills in one or more general purpose programming languages including but not limited to: Go, C/C++, Python. - Ability to think critically and to formulate solutions to problems in a clear and concise way. - Relevant professional experience with machine learning, data mining, data analysis, distribution system. - Experience with one or more of the following: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, NLP, ranking systems, recommendation systems, backend, large-scale systems, data science, full-stack. - Good product sense and experience designing and implementing product features.
Preferred Qualifications: - Possess strong technical background/experience in search/advertising/recommendation systems, NLP, LLM, etc. - Good understanding in one of the following domains: brand ads, content ads, auction, bidding, ranking, and ads forecasting. - A strong passion for tackling complex modeling challenges and building large-scale recommendation systems. - Experience in video understanding-related projects.