Senior Search & Vector Engine Engineer

Bytedance; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

ByteDance's Search team in San Jose is building a fully managed platform for information retrieval and analytics, with strong integration of Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and Milvus. You will develop high‑performance full‑text and vector search, and contribute to scalable, distributed systems that support GenAI applications, security, and observability.

You will work in a pragmatic, ambitious engineering culture, collaborating across a global team to push research into production and deliver

Qualifications

• B.S. in Computer Science, AI, ML, or related field.
• Strong software engineering skills in C++, Golang, Java, or Python.
• Experience with search engines, databases, storage systems, or distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch or Milvus in production.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and performance optimization.

Responsibilities

• Develop and evolve Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and Milvus products for high-performance search and vector retrieval.
• Implement high-performance full-text and vector search, including hybrid search and large-scale ANN retrieval.
• Optimize vector indexing and distributed retrieval across HNSW, IVF, DiskANN, RaBitQ, storage, caching, and I/O.
• Explore cloud-native Vector Lakebase architectures for scalable search over data lakes.

Skills

B.S in Computer Science

C++

Golang

Java

Python

Search engines

Distributed systems

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Milvus

Lucene

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Milvus

Job description

ByteDance's Search team in San Jose is building a fully managed platform for information retrieval and analytics, with strong integration of Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and Milvus. You will develop high‑performance full‑text and vector search, and contribute to scalable, distributed systems that support GenAI applications, security, and observability.

You will work in a pragmatic, ambitious engineering culture, collaborating across a global team to push research into production and deliver