Chief Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 257,000 - 616,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Short‑term and long‑term disability

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

10 paid holidays per year • 10 paid S/

Paid Personal Time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Head of Infrastructure to own the vision, execution, and reliability of our global platforms, data pipelines, and AI/ML infrastructure. You will lead platform engineering, SRE, networking, storage, and GPU ecosystems to deliver internet-scale availability and performance.

This role sets strategy, drives cross‑org alignment, and mentors leaders, shaping multi-region distributed systems, SLOs, and automated recovery.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in infrastructure/platform engineering with significant experience operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• 6+ years leading leaders (managers of managers) across multiple infrastructure domains; demonstrated ability to scale organizations and deliver through others.
• Proven ownership of large production environments using Kubernetes at scale (multi-cluster, multi-region); Strong hands-on understanding of networking, load balancing, and global traffic management for high-availability services.
• Demonstrated experience with CDN/EDGE delivery and performance optimization for consumer-grade, high-traffic systems; Experience running large data/storage platforms including HDFS (or equivalent distributed storage) with strong durability/capacity disciplines.
• Demonstrated ownership of SQL and NoSQL database platforms at scale, including HA/DR, replication, performance tuning, and multi-tenant governance.
• Experience building or operating AI/ML infrastructure on large GPU clusters, including distributed training/inference and multi-tenant scheduling.
• Strong executive communication skills: can translate technical constraints into business impact, investment needs, and risk posture.

Responsibilities

• Strategy & Leadership: Define and execute a multi-year infrastructure roadmap while scaling high-performing teams.
• Establish a robust leadership operating system and an accountability-driven culture to align technical goals with business impact.
• Platform & Distributed Systems: Architect and own the reliability of global, multi-region distributed systems.
• Focus on fault isolation, automated recovery, and ensuring system resilience at internet scale.
• Kubernetes (K8s) at Scale: Manage a production-grade K8s ecosystem, focusing on multi-cluster networking and workload isolation.
• Drive operational efficiency through automation, self-service primitives, and strict SLO governance.
• Data, Storage & Databases: Oversee the strategy and performance of global SQL/NoSQL fleets and modern lakehouse architectures.
• Ensure data durability, high-QPS performance, and cost-efficiency across all data platforms.
• Networking & Edge Delivery: Own global traffic engineering and CDN/Edge strategy to optimize performance and security.
• Build deep network observability to manage complex routing, failover, and multi-region connectivity.
• AI/ML & GPU Infrastructure: Architect large-scale GPU clusters to power distributed training and inference.
• Focus on maximizing hardware utilization and optimizing the network fabric for modern learning systems.
• SRE & Incident Management: Institutionalize org-wide reliability standards (SLOs) and observability.
• Lead incident command and systemic remediation to turn operational learnings into long-term prevention.

Job description

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Head of Infrastructure to own the vision, execution, and reliability of our global platforms, data pipelines, and AI/ML infrastructure. You will lead platform engineering, SRE, networking, storage, and GPU ecosystems to deliver internet-scale availability and performance.

This role sets strategy, drives cross‑org alignment, and mentors leaders, shaping multi-region distributed systems, SLOs, and automated recovery.