TikTok is continuing to expand despite coming under attack from the Trump administration in the US.
The Chinese-owned firm has announced a tie-up with online retailer Shopify to help businesses create video ads to promote their products.
TikTok also plans to take on around 3,000 engineers over the next three years.
The popular short-form video app is being forced to sell its US operations to an American company or face a ban.
In a statement released by the firm, it said, “TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance will hire the engineers mostly in Europe, Canada, the US and Singapore “to support our rapid global growth.”
TikTok currently employs about 1,000 engineers outside of China, with nearly half of them based in California.
Last month, it emerged that ByteDance plans to invest billions of dollars and recruit hundreds of employees in Singapore, which has been selected as its South East Asia headquarters.
The Trump administration says Chinese-owned social media platforms such as TikTok and Tencent’s WeChat pose a national security threat, claiming users’ data can be accessed by the Chinese government.
Both companies have repeatedly denied these allegations.
Despite the US uncertainty, TikTok continues to push ahead with its hiring expansion plan and moves into e-commerce.
On Tuesday, Canada-based Shopify said it was tying up with TikTok in the US to allow businesses to create and track video ads.
Shopify said the partnership allows its one million merchants to sell products in the form of “shoppable video ads”.
TikTok users can click on the ad to buy the product via Shopify. The tie-up will be available first in the US, where the Chinese app has around 100 million users.
There are plans to roll out the global partnership across Europe and South East Asia early next year.
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