Architect, AI-Driven Database Systems & Researcher

ByteDance; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 212,800 - 450,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Disability coverage

Life insurance

Job summary

ByteDance in San Jose seeks a Senior Software Engineer / Researcher to build AI-native databases uniting structured, unstructured, and vector data. You’ll craft storage engines for embedding ingestion, low-latency vector search, and AI-enabled query processing, working across AI infra, memory backends, and RAG systems.

Collaborate with researchers and engineers to push AI-native memory, databases, and transaction systems; publish in academia and contribute to open-source projects.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related field with strong systems or AI research experience.
• 2+ years in core database systems, large-scale distributed infrastructure, or ML systems.
• Strong coding and system-level design in C++/Rust/Go.
• Storage engine architecture, vector retrieval, AI infra, semantic search, or memory frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement AI-native databases that integrate structured, unstructured, and vector data.
• Design storage engines optimized for embedding ingestion, multimodal retrieval, and real-time AI interaction.
• Build scalable and distributed vector search systems with low-latency guarantees.
• Develop AI-augmented query processors that leverage LLMs for semantic parsing, intent understanding, and cost estimation.
• Collaborate on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) infrastructure and LLM memory backends.
• Drive innovations in learned index structures, self-optimizing databases, and AI-integrated transaction systems.
• Publish and contribute to research and open-source communities.

Skills

C++

Rust

Go

Systems design

AI research

Education

CS degree (B.S./M.S./Ph.D.)

Tools

Faiss

Milvus

DuckDB

ClickHouse

TiKV

RocksDB

Job description

ByteDance in San Jose seeks a Senior Software Engineer / Researcher to build AI-native databases uniting structured, unstructured, and vector data. You’ll craft storage engines for embedding ingestion, low-latency vector search, and AI-enabled query processing, working across AI infra, memory backends, and RAG systems.

Collaborate with researchers and engineers to push AI-native memory, databases, and transaction systems; publish in academia and contribute to open-source projects.