Machine Learning Engineer Graduate (E-Commerce) - 2027 Start (PhD) (AI)

Location: Seattle, United States; fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week

Salary: $129,960–$246,240 annually, with potential discretionary bonuses, incentives, and restricted stock units.

Company

hirify.global Joint Venture operates TikTok apps with a focus on U.S. user data protection, cybersecurity, trust and safety, and a global e-commerce ecosystem.

What you will do

• Architect and develop LLM-based systems for high-dimensional unstructured data from text, logs, conversations, and other sources.
• Define semantic understanding frameworks for fine-grained intent classification and entity extraction.
• Apply instruction tuning, RLHF/DPO, and contextual prompt engineering to improve model performance.
• Optimize production model serving using quantization, distillation, FlashAttention, and vLLM.
• Develop multimodal e-commerce models combining language, video, and product representations for classification, video QA, and cross-modal retrieval.

Requirements

• PhD completion or recent PhD graduation in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related discipline.
• Experience in machine learning, natural language processing, or computer vision.
• Proficiency in at least one of: C++, Python, Go, or Java.
• Availability to commit to an onboarding date by the end of 2027; graduation date and availability must be stated clearly on the resume.

Nice to have

• Experience fine-tuning, distilling, or applying reinforcement learning to large language models for conversational AI.
• Experience with multilingual NLP, machine translation, or cross-lingual dialogue modeling.
• Experience optimizing multimodal e-commerce video and product models.
• Understanding of e-commerce policies, dispute resolution, and merchant-buyer interactions.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance from day one.
• 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, disability coverage, and life insurance.
• Wellbeing benefits, 10 paid holidays, 10 paid sick days, and 17 days of paid personal time.
• Inclusive workplace with reasonable accommodations available during recruitment.