Research Engineer / Scientist - Storage for LLM Technology - Infrastructure San Jose Regular

ByteDance; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 156,000 - 387,600; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) savings plan with company match

Paid parental leave

Short-term and long-term disability coverage

Life insurance

Job summary

ByteDance is seeking a Research Engineer / Scientist for their San Jose location. The role involves designing and optimizing distributed KV caching systems for transformer-based LLMs. Candidates must have a PhD in a relevant field and expertise in distributed systems and KV caching.

The position offers a competitive salary and benefits, including medical and dental insurance, 401(k), and personal time off. Join a team dedicated to innovative machine learning solutions.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong understanding of transformer-based model internals and KV caching.
• Experience with distributed systems and memory management.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement a distributed KV cache system for transformer-based LLMs.
• Collaborate with teams to integrate the cache with token streaming.
• Monitor system performance and iterate on caching algorithms.

Skills

Transformer-based model internals

Distributed systems

Memory management

Low-latency serving

C++

CUDA

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

CUDA-aware networking

NVIDIA GPUs

Job description

Research Engineer / Scientist - Storage for LLM

Location: San Jose

Team: Infrastructure

Employment Type: Regular

Job Code: A244964

Responsibilities

• Design and implement a distributed KV cache system to store and retrieve intermediate states (e.g., attention keys/values) for transformer-based LLMs across GPUs or nodes.
• Optimize low‑latency access and eviction policies for caching long‑context LLM inputs, token streams, and reused embeddings.
• Collaborate with inference and serving teams to integrate the cache with token streaming pipelines, batched decoding, and model parallelism.
• Develop cache consistency and synchronization protocols for multi‑tenant, multi‑request environments.
• Implement memory‑aware sharding, eviction (e.g., windowed LRU, TTL), and replication strategies across GPUs or distributed memory backends.
• Monitor system performance and iterate on caching algorithms to reduce compute costs and response time for inference workloads.
• Evaluate and, where needed, extend open‑source KV stores or build custom GPU‑aware caching layers (e.g., CUDA, Triton, shared memory, RDMA).

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Strong understanding of transformer‑based model internals and how KV caching affects autoregressive decoding.
• Experience with distributed systems, memory management, and low‑latency serving (RPC, gRPC, CUDA‑aware networking).
• Familiarity with high‑performance compute environments (NVIDIA GPUs, TensorRT, Triton Inference Server).
• Proficiency in languages such as C++, Rust, Go, or CUDA for systems‑level development.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience building inference‑serving systems for LLMs (e.g., vLLM, SGLang, FasterTransformer, DeepSpeed, Hugging Face Text Generation Inference).
• Experience with memory hierarchy optimization (HBM, NUMA, NVLink) and GPU‑to‑GPU communication (NCCL, GDR, GDS, InfiniBand).
• Exposure to cache‑aware scheduling, batching, and prefetching strategies in model serving.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $156,000 – $387,600 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience. 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.

Benefits

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.

Equal Opportunity Statement

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems;
3. Exercising sound judgment.

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