AI Search Engineer — Global E‑Commerce at Scale

TikTok; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 154,000 - 301,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Disability coverage

Job summary

TikTok is hiring a Software Engineer for Global E-Commerce Search Infrastructure in Seattle. You will help build AI search experiences for TikTok Shop, including Q&A cards, in-app chatbot, and visual search surfaces with a focus on relevance and latency.

The role requires strong backend and AI-system knowledge, working across post-training pipelines, model-serving, and multi-agent orchestration. Join a team shipping end-to-end search at global scale.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field
• At least 3 years of industry experience building large-scale distributed systems, search infrastructure, or low-latency online services
• Proficiency in C++, Go, or Java (C++ preferred); strong systems fundamentals — data structures, OS, networking, multithreading, and Linux performance tuning
• Solid grasp of LLM and agent technologies — RAG, tool use, and multi-turn reasoning — with a track record of contributing to production AI systems
• Excellent system design instincts; able to independently architect and ship reliable, high-performance services; strong communication and ownership

Responsibilities

• Build AI Search Agents: Design and ship ReAct-based agents with planning, memory, and tool use; implement DAG workflows and RAG pipelines for multi-turn shopping assistance
• Own the unified Agent Harness across Q&A cards, in-app chatbot, and visual search surfaces
• Improve LLM Query Understanding: Drive multi-turn conversation, cross-lingual analysis, and LLM reasoning chains for accurate results; optimize answer generation pipelines for quality and latency
• Build Personalized Memory Infrastructure: Design high-throughput storage and retrieval for long-term user profiles and real-time memory for low-latency serving
• Contribute to Training and Inference Infrastructure: Collaborate on post-training pipelines and model-serving infrastructure to accelerate experimentation and latency targets
• Ship Research to Production: Bridge research and engineering to evaluate innovations and land new capabilities in production

Skills

Distributed systems

Low-latency online services

LLM and agent technologies

System design

Communication & ownership

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS/Engineering or related field

Tools

C++

Go

Java

Job description

TikTok is hiring a Software Engineer for Global E-Commerce Search Infrastructure in Seattle. You will help build AI search experiences for TikTok Shop, including Q&A cards, in-app chatbot, and visual search surfaces with a focus on relevance and latency.

The role requires strong backend and AI-system knowledge, working across post-training pipelines, model-serving, and multi-agent orchestration. Join a team shipping end-to-end search at global scale.