Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Reliability Team - USDS

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 187,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking an experienced Site Reliability Engineer to own the reliability of our production ecosystem. The role combines software and systems engineering to ensure global stability, observability, and resiliency of TikTok services.

Responsibilities include building automation, managing infrastructure as code, leading disaster recovery drills, and coordinating rapid incident response in cross-functional war rooms.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages (Go, Python, Java, or C++).
• Strong understanding of Linux system internals, networking, and distributed systems.
• Experience managing containerized environments (Kubernetes, Docker).

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end reliability of production ecosystem across global scale.
• Balance automation, performance tuning with disaster recovery focus.
• Design and optimize high-concurrency distributed systems for scalability and availability.
• Lead incident response, cross-functional war rooms, and post-mortem RCA with blameless culture.
• Develop and maintain observability, monitoring, and logging (SLIs/SLOs).
• Perform capacity planning to handle organic growth and traffic surges.

Skills

Go

Python

Java

C++

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

Responsibilities

Team Introduction The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team at TikTok combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, massively distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. Our team is dedicated to ensuring that TikTok’s core services remain stable, efficient, and resilient at a global scale. We focus on enhancing the observability and operability of our infrastructure, using data-driven insights to safeguard business stability 24/7.

As a Site Reliability Engineer, you will be responsible for the end-to-end reliability of our production ecosystem. You will balance traditional SRE functions—such as automation and performance tuning with a specialized focus on disaster recovery and rapid incident response.

• System Design & Optimization: Participate in the full lifecycle of high-concurrency distributed systems. Collaborate with development teams to ensure services are designed for scalability, reliability, and high availability.
• Automation & Efficiency: Build and maintain robust automation tools to eliminate "toil," streamline service deployments, and manage infrastructure as code.
• Observability & Monitoring: Develop and refine monitoring, alerting, and logging systems (SLIs/SLOs) to provide deep visibility into service health and performance.
• Disaster Recovery (DR) & Resilience: Lead the design, implementation, and execution of global disaster recovery drills. You will simulate complex failure scenarios and validate failover mechanisms to ensure the platform remains operational under extreme conditions.
• Incident Management & Response: Serve as a key responder for high-priority production incidents. You will coordinate cross-functional "war rooms," drive technical troubleshooting, and lead the path to service restoration.
• Continuous Improvement: Facilitate blameless post-mortems and perform root-cause analysis (RCA). You will transform incident insights into engineering requirements to harden our systems against future outages.
• Capacity Planning: Manage resource allocation and performance bottlenecks to ensure the platform can handle organic growth and massive traffic surges.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g., Go, Python, Java, or C++).
• Strong understanding of Linux system internals, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, Load Balancing), and distributed systems.
• Experience managing containerized environments (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Proven experience in a high-traffic production environment with a focus on incident response and site stability.
• Hands-on experience with Disaster Recovery strategies, including multi-region failover and data consistency in distributed databases.
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code.

About USDS

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision‑making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.

On‑site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real‑time decision‑making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in‑person schedule up to 5 days a week.

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.

USDS Reasonable Accommodation

USDS 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/USDS-RA

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $187040 - $359720 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.