Research Scientist - AI Compute & DPU - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)

ByteDance; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 202,160 - 368,220; Full time

Job summary

ByteDance is recruiting PhD graduates to help build the next generation AI compute and DPU infrastructure. The role focuses on disaggregated, heterogeneous AI workloads, high-performance scheduling, and scalable vector retrieval across cloud-native environments.

Successful candidates will contribute to AI-native infrastructure, hardware/software co-design, and open-source collaborations while working on geographically distributed data centers to power flagship ByteDance products.

Qualifications

• PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• First-author publications in top venues (e.g., OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, NeurIPS, MLSys) with clear technical contributions.
• Strong system-building ability with hands-on experience beyond prototypes.
• Solid understanding of compute, network architecture, and operating systems.
• Deep expertise in LLM inference / AI-ML systems, or system optimization / software-hardware co-design.
• Demonstrated ownership of significant technical work with clear problem framing and decisions.
• Strong programming skills and ability to reason about complex system design.

Skills

Distributed systems

ML systems

Publications

System building

Compute architecture

Networking

Programming

Education

PhD in CS/CE/SE

Tools

RDMA

NCCL

DPDK

SPDK

OVS

SR-IOV

eBPF

Job description

Responsibilities

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2027. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at our Company.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by end of year 2027. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Team Introduction

We are the business owners of the AI Compute layer and DPU at ByteDance, and the creator and open‑source maintainer of AIBrix, a Kubernetes‑native control plane for large‑scale LLM inference. We are building the next‑generation AI‑native computing stack—a vertically integrated system spanning hardware acceleration, distributed orchestration, and model serving—to power some of the largest AI workloads in the world.

Our organization—AI Compute + DPU—unifies three foundational layers:

• AI Compute & Orchestration Planet‑scale, cloud‑native scheduling and serverless systems built on Kubernetes, operating across hundreds of clusters with hundreds of millions of containers and jobs daily.
• Inference Infrastructure We support Seed business workloads (including SeedDance and other ByteDance models), as well as a wide range of open‑source models. Through the open‑sourcing of AIBrix, we are re‑architecting LLM inference around KV cache systems, multimodal serving, advanced scheduling, and disaggregated execution, pushing the frontier of performance, cost efficiency, and latency.
• DPU & Hardware‑Accelerated Systems Next‑generation software–hardware co‑design across compute, networking, and storage—covering GPU virtualization, RDMA/DPDK‑based networking, high‑speed interconnects, and distributed storage acceleration.

Together, we operate a globally distributed, hyperscale AI infrastructure powering products such as Doubao/Dola and CapCut, with a rapidly growing fleet of accelerators and increasingly deep integration with open‑source ecosystems.

What Makes This Different

• Re‑architecting LLM inference for heterogeneous, disaggregated environments
• Designing next‑generation scheduling and caching primitives for AI workloads
• Bridging research breakthroughs with production systems at scale
• Building infrastructure that can self‑optimize via AI (AI for systems)
• Driving cost‑efficiency at extreme scale (GPU, CPU, network, power)

This is a system‑defining opportunity to work on problems that do not yet have established solutions.

Who We Are Looking For

Through our Global Frontier Recruitment Program, we are selectively hiring a very small number of PhD candidates (graduating 2026–2027) who demonstrate the potential to define technical directions, lead complex systems end‑to‑end, and create lasting impact in AI infrastructure.

We are not looking for strong candidates.

We are looking for candidates whose absence would be felt.

Topic Content

With the large‑scale adoption of LLMs and AI agents, traditional cloud‑native infrastructure can no longer meet the ultra‑high performance and elasticity requirements of AI workloads. This topic conducts systematic research across the entire AI infrastructure stack:

• Network and Observability Research intelligent fault localization and root cause analysis for large‑scale AI clusters, combined with intelligent tuning of time‑series databases to improve cluster stability.
• Storage Systems Develop serverless high‑performance elastic file systems and storage acceleration architectures specifically for AI scenarios, explore hardware‑software co‑optimization for DPU, and overcome AI storage performance bottlenecks.
• Data Center Power Scheduling Research GPU/CPU/MEM heterogeneous collaborative scheduling technologies, build a heterogeneous power orchestration system for AI agents, and address scheduling challenges including heterogenous workloads and state dependencies.
• Vector Retrieval Optimize core vector retrieval technologies for LLM‑powered applications, building a cloud‑native distributed vector index engine to meet ultra‑large‑scale vector retrieval demands with low latency and low cost.
• Intelligence and Agent Architecture Explore automatic infrastructure optimization based on AI Agent workflows, build a self‑evolvable business agent framework, and enable full‑stack intelligent optimization through AI for Infra.

This topic aims to build a next‑generation AI‑native infrastructure to support the deployment of LLMs and AI agents, improve resource utilization, reduce costs, support elastic scaling, and drive the technological evolution of AI infrastructure.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Individuals who are completing or recently completed a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline, with a focus on distributed and ML systems.
• Proven first‑author publications in top venues (e.g., OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, NeurIPS, MLSys, etc.) with clear technical contributions.
• Strong system‑building ability, with hands‑on experience implementing or optimizing real systems beyond prototypes.
• Solid understanding of compute, network architecture, and operating systems.
• Deep expertise in at least one of the following: LLM inference / AI‑ML systems, system optimization for AI (e.g., scheduling, observability, resource management, high‑performance networking), or software‑hardware co‑design.
• Demonstrated ownership of significant technical work (research or systems), with the ability to clearly articulate the problem defined, decisions made, and why the outcome depended on their contribution.
• Strong programming skills and the ability to reason about complex system design.

Preferred Qualifications

• A sustained track record of high‑impact research, with evidence of influence (citations, follow‑up work, or adoption in real systems).
• Experience taking ideas from research to production, including deployment, evaluation, and iteration in real environments.
• Deep expertise in frontier areas such as large‑scale model training and inference, heterogeneous computing optimization across GPUs/DPUs/accelerators, software‑hardware co‑design (e.g., FPGA/ASIC) across networking/storage/distributed compute, or high‑performance networking (e.g., RDMA, NCCL, DPDK/SPDK) with hands‑on experience in network virtualization (OVS, SR‑IOV, eBPF).
• Proven ability to lead technical direction, not just contribute—e.g., defining a research agenda, owning a system component, or driving cross‑functional decisions.
• Contributions to widely used open‑source systems or infrastructure projects.
• Strong industry research experience or collaboration with leading labs.
• Ability to reason rigorously about system‑level trade‑offs (latency, throughput, cost, scalability) and translate them into practical designs.

Job Information

Compensation Description (Annually): The base salary range for this position in the selected city is 202160 - 368220 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.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. 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

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

• 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;
• 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.