Senior Software Engineer / Researcher, AI-Native database systems

ByteDance; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 212,800 - 450,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Disability coverage

Life insurance

Job summary

ByteDance in San Jose seeks a Senior Software Engineer / Researcher to build AI-native databases uniting structured, unstructured, and vector data. You’ll craft storage engines for embedding ingestion, low-latency vector search, and AI-enabled query processing, working across AI infra, memory backends, and RAG systems.

Collaborate with researchers and engineers to push AI-native memory, databases, and transaction systems; publish in academia and contribute to open-source projects.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related field with strong systems or AI research experience.
• 2+ years in core database systems, large-scale distributed infrastructure, or ML systems.
• Strong coding and system-level design in C++/Rust/Go.
• Storage engine architecture, vector retrieval, AI infra, semantic search, or memory frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement AI-native databases that integrate structured, unstructured, and vector data.
• Design storage engines optimized for embedding ingestion, multimodal retrieval, and real-time AI interaction.
• Build scalable and distributed vector search systems with low-latency guarantees.
• Develop AI-augmented query processors that leverage LLMs for semantic parsing, intent understanding, and cost estimation.
• Collaborate on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) infrastructure and LLM memory backends.
• Drive innovations in learned index structures, self-optimizing databases, and AI-integrated transaction systems.
• Publish and contribute to research and open-source communities.

Skills

C++

Rust

Go

Systems design

AI research

Education

CS degree (B.S./M.S./Ph.D.)

Tools

Faiss

Milvus

DuckDB

ClickHouse

TiKV

RocksDB

Job description

Senior Software Engineer / Researcher, AI-Native database systems

Location: San Jose

Team: Infrastructure

Employment Type: Regular

Job Code: A113185

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement AI-native databases that seamlessly integrate structured, unstructured, and vectorized data.
• Design storage engines optimized for embedding ingestion, multimodal retrieval, and real-time AI interaction.
• Build scalable and distributed vector search systems with low-latency guarantees.
• Develop AI-augmented query processors that leverage large language models (LLMs) for semantic parsing, intent understanding, and cost estimation.
• Collaborate on developing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) infrastructure and LLM agent memory backends.
• Drive innovations in learned index structures, self-optimizing databases, and AI-integrated transaction systems.
• Publish and contribute to broader research and open-source communities.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related fields with strong systems or AI research experience.
• 2+ years in core database systems, large-scale distributed infrastructure, or machine learning systems.
• Strong coding and system-level design skills in C++ / Rust / Go.
• Deep expertise in one or more of the following areas:
  • Storage engine architecture (LSM‑trees, column stores, HTAP systems)
  • Vector retrieval systems, similarity search, and ANN indexing
  • AI infra or model‑serving infrastructure (especially for embeddings / RAG / LLMs)
  • Semantic search, agent systems, or AI-native memory frameworks
• Ability to collaborate across research, engineering, and product teams to translate ideas into production systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with open-source systems such as Faiss, Milvus, DuckDB, ClickHouse, TiKV, RocksDB.
• Publications at accredited conferences (e.g., SIGMOD, VLDB, NeurIPS, MLSys, ICDE).
• Familiarity with GCP, AWS, or Azure’s database and AI integration strategies.
• Prior contributions to RAG, memory‑augmented models, or self‑tuning database components.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $212800 - $450000 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

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).

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:

• 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;
• Exercising sound judgment.

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.