Research Engineer Graduate (Agent Systems & AI Coding Environment – Seed Infra) – 2026 Start (PhD)

ByteDance; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 242,000 - 456,000; 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

Paid time off (holidays, sick days, PT

Job summary

ByteDance Seed invites PhD graduates to join their team focused on distributed training, reinforcement learning framework, and AI inference for foundation models. You will work on building agent harnesses and scalable workflows, collaborating with research and product teams to productionize agent systems.

Successful candidates will have strong Python, system-building experience, and familiarity with LLM-based pipelines, Docker/Kubernetes, and distributed infrastructure.

Qualifications

• PhD completed or near completion in CS, EE, ECE, Physics, Mathematics, or related field.
• Strong programming skills (Python or similar) and solid system-building experience.
• Experience with LLM-based systems, pipelines, or tool-integrated workflows.
• Understanding of system design and building scalable infrastructure.
• Experience building agent harness / runtime systems or AI coding environments.
• Docker, Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems, distributed job execution, and containerized/sandboxed code execution environments.

Responsibilities

• Build agent harness and execution environments for AI coding and knowledge tasks (code execution, tool integration, sandboxing, system interaction).
• Develop scalable orchestration frameworks for multi-step agent workflows (planning, tool use, memory, coordination).
• Design evaluation and benchmarking systems to measure agent performance across complex, long-horizon tasks.
• Improve agent performance via prompting, data curation, and post-training in collaboration with model and RL teams.
• Partner with research and product teams to productionize agent systems.

Skills

Python

System design

LLM pipelines

Docker

Agent harness

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Responsibilities

About the Team

The Seed Infrastructures team oversees the distributed training, reinforcement learning framework, high-performance inference, and heterogeneous hardware compilation technologies for AI foundation models.

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Responsibilities

• Build agent harness and execution environments for AI coding and knowledge tasks (code execution, tool integration, sandboxing, system interaction)


• Develop scalable orchestration frameworks for multi-step agent workflows (planning, tool use, memory, coordination)


• Design evaluation and benchmarking systems to measure agent performance across complex, long-horizon tasks


• Improve agent performance via prompting, data curation, and post-training in collaboration with model and RL teams


• Partner with research and product teams to productionize agent systems

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or a related discipline.


• Strong programming skills (Python or similar) and solid system-building experience


• Experience with LLM-based systems, pipelines, or tool-integrated workflows


• Understanding of system design and building scalable infrastructure


• Experience building agent harness / runtime systems or AI coding environments


• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems, distributed job execution, and containerized/sandboxed code execution environments

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with evaluation frameworks, prompting / finetuning / RL, or large-scale experimentation

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $241680 - $456000 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

• Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others.


• Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

• Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;


• Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and


• Exercising sound judgment.

About Doubao (Seed)

Established in 2023, the ByteDance Seed team is dedicated to pioneering new paths toward artificial general intelligence. We aspire to advance the frontier of intelligence to drive progress for both technology and society.

With a long-term vision for the AI sector, the Seed team's research spans MLLM, GenMedia, AI for Science, and Robotics. We maintain a global presence with laboratories and career opportunities across China, Singapore, and the United States. To date, we have launched industry-leading general foundation models and cutting-edge multimodal capabilities. Our technology powers over 50 application scenarios — including Doubao, Jimeng, TRAE, Dola and Dreamnia — and serves enterprise customers through Volcano Engine and BytePlus. Third-party data shows that the Doubao App ranks first in user volume in the Chinese market, while Doubao foundation models lead the industry in average daily token consumption.

Why Join ByteDance

Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.

As ByteDancers, we strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. By constantly iterating and fostering an \"Always Day 1\" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our Company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

ByteDance is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

Reasonable Accommodation

ByteDance is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request