AI-Driven Recommendation Infrastructure Engineer

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 388,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision

401(k) with company match

Parental leave

Paid time off

Job summary

TikTok Inc. in San Jose, CA, is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to help build scalable infrastructure powering global recommendation systems.

You will work on 24/7, high-throughput systems in C++ and related tech stacks, collaborating with cross-functional teams to improve reliability and performance. Applicants should have strong backend experience, systems programming in C++/Go/Java, and a track record of optimizing large-scale services.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field is required.
• Experience building scalable backend or infrastructure systems.
• Strong programming skills in C++, Go, or Java and understanding of systems.
• Ability to work with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Improve recommendation system iteration efficiency by enhancing observability, debuggability, automation, scheduling, and execution reliability, with clear impact on cost, iteration speed, reliability, and serving performance.
• Design and build AI-native agentic engineering systems that automate end-to-end engineering workflows, including system observation, issue diagnosis, root-cause analysis, optimization planning, execution, validation, rollout, and post-change verification.
• Build 24/7 closed-loop automation capabilities to replace repetitive, low-efficiency manual engineering work and reduce human overhead in system iteration, performance optimization, and reliability improvement.
• Partner closely with recommendation algorithm teams to support strategy scale-up, improve compute efficiency, accelerate recommendation system iteration, and co-design efficient agentic system infrastructure.
• Optimize high-performance computing frameworks, storage systems, distributed infrastructure components, and runtime systems for recommendation workloads.

Skills

C++

Go

Java

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

TikTok Inc. in San Jose, CA, is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to help build scalable infrastructure powering global recommendation systems.

You will work on 24/7, high-throughput systems in C++ and related tech stacks, collaborating with cross-functional teams to improve reliability and performance. Applicants should have strong backend experience, systems programming in C++/Go/Java, and a track record of optimizing large-scale services.