Senior Backend Engineer, Live Recommendation Infra

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 254,000 - 588,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) savings plan with company match

Paid parental leave

Short-term disability coverage

Long-term disability coverage

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

10 paid holidays per year

10 paid sick days per year

17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorate

Job summary

TikTok Inc. is hiring for a role in the Live-stream Recommendation Infra team. You will design and operate backend systems that scale for training, inference, and data pipelines to support next‑gen recommendation workloads.

Collaborate with ML engineers to productionize models and optimize performance across training, inference, and data workflows in a high-traffic live streaming environment. Strong distributed systems experience is essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field.
• At least 3 years of experience in strong programming skills in C++, Go, or Java, and scripting experience in Python.
• Solid experience in distributed systems and backend service development.
• Hands-on experience with ML infrastructure, including model serving, inference optimization, or large-scale training systems.
• Proficiency in building and maintaining data pipelines such as Spark, Flink, Kafka, Hadoop, or similar.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to work in fast-paced, collaborative environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend systems that support large-scale recommendation workloads, including training, inference, and data pipelines.
• Develop robust and efficient model infrastructure, including distributed training pipelines and low-latency inference serving.
• Architect and improve data pipelines to enable efficient collection, preprocessing, and offline feature engineering for recommendation and ranking models.
• Collaborate closely with ML engineers and researchers to productionize models and integrate them into the TikTok Live recommendation stack.
• Drive performance optimization and cost-efficiency across training, inference, and data workflows.
• Ensure system robustness, scalability, and maintainability in high-traffic live streaming scenarios.

Skills

C++/Go/Java

Python scripting

Distributed systems

ML infrastructure

Data pipelines

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science

Tools

Spark

Flink

Kafka

Hadoop

Kubernetes

Job description

TikTok Inc. is hiring for a role in the Live-stream Recommendation Infra team. You will design and operate backend systems that scale for training, inference, and data pipelines to support next‑gen recommendation workloads.

Collaborate with ML engineers to productionize models and optimize performance across training, inference, and data workflows in a high-traffic live streaming environment. Strong distributed systems experience is essential.