Coding for Artificial Intelligence at TikTok
By Kayleigh Migdol
As a middle school student, Kayleigh Migdol enjoyed playing “The Sims.” She spent countless hours crafting her characters, and eventually wanted to learn more about how the AI mechanism worked. Over time, she was able to learn more about AI and eventually Machine Learning (ML) and Statistical Modeling.
She knew she wanted to research Machine Learning, and started college at Humboldt State (now Cal Poly Humboldt) before transferring to Carnegie Mellon. After an industry internship the summer after her junior year, she found she enjoyed building systems more than conducting research.
Kayleigh graduated with a degree in Statistics and Machine Learning, and currently works at TikTok as part of the AI Privacy team. The goal for Kayleigh and her team is to build systems that ensure data isn’t being used improperly; for example, making sure gender isn’t being used to determine what ads you are shown on the app.
As a software engineer, coding is the main part of her job, and she spends most of her time building out data pipelines and notebooks along with maintaining the service to manage the samples themselves. She also works on sampling different data being used for ML models, allowing her team to be able to identify what kinds of attributes are being included in the data and whether the data is being used properly. Sampling tens of thousands of datasheets along with being able to store samples is an extremely computationally expensive problem, and Kayleigh spends much of her time figuring out how to optimize them.
She uses the following programming languages and tools in her role:
- Python, MySQL, spark, Jupyter for data processing
- Golang for microservices
For aspiring coders, Kayleigh says,
“Software engineering is just figuring out how to break down big problems into smaller problems. If something seems overwhelming or you aren’t sure how to approach something, try and break it down into smaller parts. Keep on doing that until it is the smallest possible problem.”
When she isn’t tackling AI problems at TikTok, Kayleigh enjoys playing board games with her friends. Her current favorite game is Blood on the Clocktower!
