Research scientist - AI Infra - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)

ByteDance; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 218,000 - 388,000; Full time

Job summary

ByteDance is seeking talented graduates to join our AI Factory Architecture team in 2027. You will design scalable AI infrastructure across the full stack for training, RL, and inference, working alongside engineers, researchers, and hardware specialists.

You will track trends in AI systems and cognitive science to inform memory and reasoning substrates, build prototypes, and help optimize performance of AI memory systems across the ML stack.

Qualifications

• PhD in CS/EE or related technical discipline; backgrounds in cognitive science or psychology welcome with strong systems fundamentals.
• Experience in distributed systems, infrastructure engineering, or ML systems and evaluating trade-offs across hardware, software, energy, and supply-chain constraints.
• Strong proficiency in integrating AI tools into knowledge discovery and research workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to learn quickly and stay productive in a fast-evolving technical horizon.
• Excellent communication skills to collaborate across teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and evaluate scalable architectures across the full AI factory for training, RL, and inference workloads.
• Track emerging trends in AI systems, distributed training, RL, and AI memory research; build prototypes and share insights.
• Analyze and optimize performance across the ML stack, including scheduling, networking, storage, and AI memory systems.
• Work cross-functionally with research, engineering, hardware, data-center, and product teams to translate AI workload requirements into scalable solutions.

Skills

Distributed systems

ML systems

Large-scale training

Research collaboration

Education

PhD in Computer Science/Engineering or related

Tools

NCCL

RDMA

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.

Team Introduction

We are a lean architect & research team responsible for defining the next generation of AI infrastructure at Bytedance. AI is a fast-evolving horizon — pretraining, RL, and agentic workloads each reshape the requirements faster than traditional cloud abstractions can absorb — and our team is built to keep pace rather than simply react. We approach the problem as an end-to-end AI factory: a tightly coupled production system spanning data, applications, software infrastructure, chips, energy, and the broader supply chain. In this role, you will work at the intersection of large-scale systems, AI, emerging hardware, and the cognitive foundations of intelligent agents — including next-generation AI memory systems informed by cognitive science and psychology — designing scalable architectures and driving innovations across the full AI factory stack.

Responsibilities

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.

AI Factory Architecture

Design and evaluate scalable architectures across the full AI factory — compute, storage, networking, chips, power, and the data and application layers — for large-scale training, RL, and inference workloads. Develop technical proposals for supply-chain and energy constraints alongside silicon and software trade-offs.

Research & Technology Exploration

Track emerging trends across AI systems, distributed training and RL, and hardware acceleration, as well as adjacent fields such as cognitive science and psychology that inform AI memory and reasoning substrates. Build prototypes and share insights through technical reports.

AI Memory & System Performance Optimization

Analyze and optimize performance across the ML stack — scheduling, networking, storage, training and RL frameworks, and emerging AI memory systems for long-horizon agents — through benchmarking and bottleneck analysis.

Cross-Team Technical Alignment

Work across research, engineering, hardware, data-center, and product teams to translate AI workload requirements into scalable solutions and drive cross-team initiatives spanning the full AI factory.

Topic Content

• 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 Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline. Backgrounds in cognitive science, computational neuroscience, or psychology are also welcome when paired with strong systems fundamentals.
• Experience in distributed systems, infrastructure engineering, or ML systems — including exposure to large-scale training or RL pipelines — and comfort evaluating trade-offs across hardware, software, algorithms, energy, and supply-chain constraints.
• Strong proficiency in integrating AI tools into knowledge discovery and research workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to learn quickly and stay productive on a fast‑evolving technical horizon.
• Excellent communication skills to collaborate across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with large‑scale model training and inference — distributed pretraining, post‑training, RL, KV cache‑aware serving, GPU/accelerator optimization, and high‑performance networking (e.g., RDMA, NCCL).
• Experience with heterogeneous AI compute systems, large‑scale training clusters, HPC‑style distributed workloads, and data pipelines for training and evaluation.
• Familiarity with AI memory systems, retrieval‑augmented architectures, or agent long‑term memory designs — bonus for exposure to cognitive‑science or psychology literature on memory and reasoning.
• Exposure to chip‑level design, data‑center energy and cooling, or AI hardware supply‑chain considerations across the AI factory.
• Publications in systems and/or machine learning conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, OSDI, SOSP, ASPLOS, MLSys).
• Contributions to open‑source projects.

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $218400 - $387600 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

• 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 Us

Founded in 2012, ByteDance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, ByteDance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.

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