Software Engineer - TikTok AI Search Infrastructure

TikTok, San Jose, California

Posted pay

Pay not posted

Location: San Jose, California
Work type: Not given
Level: Not given
Experience: 5+ years
Skills in the job text: C++
Linux
Posted: Not given
Last check: 19 h ago
Job type: Infra, platform & SRE, Inference & ML systems, ML / AI engineering

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TikTok

Open tech jobs: 1,329
With posted pay: 2%
Median posted base: $218K–$345K

About TikTok: funding, hiring and pay

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The team

TikTok AI Search Infra team is responsible for building highly performant, scalable and stable infrastructures that serve billions of search requests everyday, and reinventing the search experience of billions of users globally. We apply cutting edge ML/NLP/LLM/VLM technology for end-to-end modeling, and focus on building and optimizing performance/efficiency for large-scale ML infra and online/offline distributed systems, enabling AI to realize its potential value for billions of TikTok users. We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving.

What you will do

Evolve TikTok’s AI Search multi-agent LLM engine, supporting ReAct + Tool calling, DAG-based workflows, and RAG paradigms
Deploy and optimize text/multimodal LLMs, including inference acceleration, model alignment during training, and reinforcement learning
Build scalable and reliable end-to-end serving platforms supporting multiple TikTok AI Search use cases, such as Q&A cards, in-app chatbot, and visual search, including both online and offline scenarios
Build large-scale data architecture for handling billion-level data records: offline computation, distributed system performance and scheduling optimization, as well as building high-availability, high-throughput, and low-latency online services
Design and build personalized AI search capabilities to achieve more accurate AI Overview and Q&A experience for users
Collaborate with modeling and product teams to deliver better AI search experience for Tiktok users

What you need

Bachelor or advanced degree in Computer Science or related disciplines
At least 5 years of industry experience in one of the following areas: recommendation, search, Ads and ML Infra
Strong Computer Science background, proficient coding skills and solid understanding of algorithm & data structure.
Have experience in at least one of the following areas: recommendation system, search engine, advertising engine, Agent/RAG engine, LLM serving/training.
Effective communication and teamwork skills, strong ownership mindset

Nice to have

Familiar with system performance optimization in Linux environment, experience with large-scale C++ system development are preferred
Familiar with large-scale distributed systems development; experience with distributed databases or distributed data processing frameworks is a plus
Experience with GPU inference optimization, LLM/VLM serving and training are preferred

Read the job posting on the TikTok site

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Source: the company job board. We last checked this job 19 h ago. We first saw it 7 days ago. A job on a job board does not always mean that the team interviews people now.

Interview questions

No one has reported an interview at TikTok yet. Did you interview there? Add the questions.

TikTok

Open tech jobs: 1,329
With posted pay: 2%
Median posted base: $218K–$345K

About TikTok: funding, hiring and pay