Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Data Infrastructure

TikTok; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 207,000 - 368,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to join the Data Infrastructure SRE team. You will ensure reliability, scalability, and efficiency of core data services that power our products, operating a distributed environment built on Kubernetes, Redis, MySQL, and MQ.

You will participate in a rotational on-call schedule, respond to incidents, and work across time zones with rigorous change management and post-incident reviews to maintain system stability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in a Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or similar role.
• Strong proficiency in a programming or scripting language (e.g., Go, Python, Bash) for automation and tool development.
• Deep understanding of Linux/Unix operating systems, networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS), and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Incident response and postmortems: lead triage, ensure blameless reviews, drive follow-ups.
• SLO/SLA and error budgets: define and maintain objectives for data services.
• Capacity and cost optimization: plan capacity, tune performance, automate scaling.
• Pragmatic automation and AI orchestration: build tools and AI agents to reduce toil.
• Operational excellence and change management: maintain runbooks, monitoring, and deploy readiness.
• Data Center and AI infrastructure: oversee data centers and AI hardware for high availability.
• Cross-team mentorship: advise other teams and mentor junior SREs.

Skills

Go

Python

Bash

Linux/Unix

Networking (TCP/IP, DNS)

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Redis

MySQL

Kafka

Flink

Job description

Responsibilities

The Data Infrastructure SRE team is responsible for the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of the core data services that power our products. We manage a massive, distributed environment built on technologies like Kubernetes, Redis, MySQL, and Message Queue. Our work is not about building features, but about engineering the resilience and performance of the underlying platform that all product teams depend on. We are the guardians of production, ensuring our data systems run smoothly, nonstop.

This role includes participation in a rotational on-call schedule to ensure nonstop coverage for our critical data infrastructure. You will be expected to respond to, troubleshoot, and resolve production incidents. Our team collaborates across multiple time zones, and you will engage in rigorous change management and post-incident review processes to maintain system stability.

As a Site Reliability Engineer, you will be on the front lines of keeping our large-scale data systems running reliably and efficiently. You will focus on hands-on operational work, from responding to alerts and managing production changes to automating routine tasks. This role is an excellent opportunity to develop deep expertise in modern infrastructure technologies and SRE practices while working alongside senior engineers to solve challenging problems.

• Incident response and postmortems: Act as an incident commander for critical production issues, guiding the team through triage and resolution. Drive deep, blameless post-incident reviews and ensure that follow-up actions are implemented to prevent recurrence.
• SLO/SLA and error budgets: Define, negotiate, and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for critical data services. Champion the use of error budgets to balance reliability work with feature development.
• Capacity and cost optimization: Lead initiatives in capacity planning, performance tuning, and resource management. Develop strategies and automation to ensure our infrastructure scales efficiently and stays within budget.
• Pragmatic automation and AI orchestration: Design and build automation and leverage AI Agents to eliminate operational toil, improve deployment safety, and enhance overall operational efficiency. Focus on creating maintainable, robust tools and intelligent workflows that make the entire team more effective.
• Operational excellence and change management: Uphold and improve our standards for production operations, including runbooks, monitoring, and alerting. Vet complex changes and deployments to ensure they meet our bar for production readiness.
• Data Center and AI Infrastructure: Lead the construction, maintenance, and optimization of data centers and specialized AI infrastructure, ensuring high availability and peak performance for complex AI-driven workloads.
• Cross-team influence and mentorship: Act as a subject matter expert on reliability, consulting with application development and other infrastructure teams. Mentor junior SREs, helping them develop their technical and operational skills.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in a Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or similar role.
• Strong proficiency in a programming or scripting language (e.g., Go, Python, Bash) for automation and tool development.
• Deep understanding of Linux/Unix operating systems, networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS), and distributed systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on experience managing large-scale data infrastructure (e.g., MySQL, Redis, Kafka, Flink).
• Proven experience with container orchestration technologies, particularly Kubernetes, in a production environment.
• Expertise in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems.
• A systematic problem-solving approach, coupled with strong communication skills and a sense of ownership.
• Experience leading incident response for complex, high-impact events.
• Experience in the operation and construction of Data Centers is a big plus.

About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is 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 bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.

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. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. 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

TikTok 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 TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. 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.

TikTok Accommodation

TikTok 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

Job Information

• 【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
• The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $207480 - $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:
• 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; and
• 3. Exercising sound judgment.