Software Engineer, Ads Tooling

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 137,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Paid holidays

Paid sick days

Paid personal time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking engineers to build and own internal tooling and platforms powering ads system validation, including test frameworks, data provisioning, and self-service harnesses. You will automate manual workflows and integrate validation into CI/CD as release gates.

You will also craft system-health monitoring and quality checks for ads pipelines, with a focus on automation, efficiency, and scalable infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or above in computer science or related technical disciplines.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience in software engineering, developer tooling, quality engineering, or test infrastructure for complex and scalable distributed systems.
• Track record of building tooling or frameworks used by other engineers, not only authoring tests within an existing framework.
• Hands-on authorship of CI/CD pipelines including release-gating logic.
• Demonstrated instinct for spotting repetitive or manual engineering work and replacing it with automation, with measurable results.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the internal tooling and platforms that power ads system validation - test frameworks, environment and data provisioning, assertion libraries, and self-service harnesses that let engineers validate changes without hand-rolling infrastructure each time.
• Identify inefficient engineering workflows and automate them away. Audit how the team actually works today - manual verification steps, repeated debugging rituals, slow feedback loops, high-toil release procedures - quantify the cost, and build the tooling that eliminates it.
• Build quality infrastructure for ads systems, including training/serving consistency checks, prediction-service invariant and fallback validation.
• Build automated system-health monitoring that surfaces regressions in business and quality metrics, routes findings to the owning engineer with enough context to act, and shortens time-to-detection.
• Integrate tooling into CI/CD as release gates, so validation runs by default rather than by remembering to run it.
• Treat internal engineers as your users - measure adoption, gather feedback, and iterate on developer experience rather than shipping tools and walking away.
• Bring in new ideas and tooling, including applying LLM and agent-based approaches to test generation, failure triage, and coverage analysis.

Skills

Software engineering

Dev tooling

Quality engineering

CI/CD

Automation

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

CI/CD pipelines

Test frameworks

Automation tooling

Environment provisioning

Job description

Responsibilities

The ads system at TikTok operates on a massive scale and serves millions of advertisers, clients and influencers across the world. The quality of the ads system depends heavily on the underlying infrastructure that handles massive data. The USDS Ads team empowers TikTok's global monetization by efficiently delivering ads and content on TikTok.

Tooling is what makes changing that system fast - and safe. Ads correctness cannot be asserted by comparing an expected string to an actual one: ranking outputs are probabilistic, behavior is driven as much by configuration as by code, and a silent regression in a prediction pipeline costs revenue long before it triggers an alert. Off-the-shelf test frameworks don't cover this, so we build our own. You will build the platforms and tooling that let every engineer on the team validate their changes - automated validation across ads pipelines, and continuous system-health monitoring that protects business metrics. Just as importantly, you'll go looking for the manual, repetitive, and error-prone workflows our engineers live with today, and replace them with automation.

You'll join a team that invests in your growth - with mentorship from senior engineers, ownership of real surfaces from early on, and a clear path toward technical leadership.

• Build and own the internal tooling and platforms that power ads system validation - test frameworks, environment and data provisioning, assertion libraries, and self-service harnesses that let engineers validate changes without hand-rolling infrastructure each time.
• Identify inefficient engineering workflows and automate them away. Audit how the team actually works today - manual verification steps, repeated debugging rituals, slow feedback loops, high-toil release procedures - quantify the cost, and build the tooling that eliminates it.
• Build quality infrastructure for ads systems, including training/serving consistency checks, prediction-service invariant and fallback validation.
• Build automated system-health monitoring that surfaces regressions in business and quality metrics, routes findings to the owning engineer with enough context to act, and shortens time-to-detection.
• Integrate tooling into CI/CD as release gates, so validation runs by default rather than by remembering to run it.
• Treat internal engineers as your users - measure adoption, gather feedback, and iterate on developer experience rather than shipping tools and walking away.
• Bring in new ideas and tooling, including applying LLM and agent-based approaches to test generation, failure triage, and coverage analysis.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or above, major in computer science or related technical disciplines.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience in software engineering, developer tooling, quality engineering, or test infrastructure for complex and scalable distributed systems.
• Track record of building tooling or frameworks used by other engineers - not only authoring tests within an existing framework.
• Hands-on authorship of CI/CD pipelines including release-gating logic.
• Demonstrated instinct for spotting repetitive or manual engineering work and replacing it with automation, with measurable results.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in the Ads domain - auction mechanics, bidding, ranking, attribution, or billing.
• Experience building internal developer platforms, engineering-efficiency tooling, or test infrastructure adopted across a team or org.
• Experience testing or validating large-scale ranking and machine learning infrastructure, including model evaluation, A/B experiment correctness, or online/offline consistency.
• Applied LLM/agent tooling for engineering workflows, including structured-output schema design.

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 $136800 - $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:
• 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.