Software Engineer, Enterprise Platform - Frontier Generative AI

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking an engineer to own end-to-end product development, taking ideas from prototype to production and shipping enterprise features with real customer impact.

You will pair with ML and inference teams to turn frontier model capability into reliable, scalable enterprise solutions, while owning delivery and instrumentation across the stack.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in CS/CE or related technical discipline.
• 3+ years as a software engineer in production systems.
• Strong programming skills in C/C++ and/or Python.
• Ability to move across backend services, front-end surfaces, and tooling.

Responsibilities

• End-to-end product engineering from prototype to production.
• Ship enterprise features that meet real-world quality and customer needs.
• Collaborate with ML and inference teams to scale frontier AI capabilities.

Skills

C/C++

Python

Data structures & algorithms

Ownership & shipping

Education

BS or MS in CS/CE or related technical discipline

Job description

Responsibilities

We're a high-ownership engineering team inside TikTok USDS JV shipping a flagship B2B AI product at the frontier of large-model inference and creative automation. If you want your engineering decisions to be the reason an industry-leading brand team trusts a new AI platform with their content production, this is the seat.

About the Team

We are the engineering incubator for TikTok USDS JV's newest enterprise AI products. Our remit spans the full lifecycle — from the first localizable prototype to a scaled, multi-region, enterprise-grade service. The team has shipped products that have grown from a handful of design partners to global enterprise rollouts, and the pipeline keeps growing.

We operate with a strong 0→1 mindset: ambiguity is the default, ownership is non-negotiable, and the patterns that the next decade of enterprise AI will be measured against are being prototyped on our team right now.

Responsibilities

• - End-to-end product engineering. Take ideas from prototype to production. One week you might be building the foundational services that power the product; the next, the user-facing surface or operator tooling; the week after, the instrumentation and feedback loops that tell you whether it worked.
• - Enterprise features with real customer impact. Ship the capabilities enterprise customers evaluate, contract against, and renew on — features that have to meet a real-world quality bar, not a demo bar.
• - Pair with ML on the frontier. Work side by side with our ML and inference teams to turn frontier model capability into something enterprise customers can rely on — predictable, isolated, audit-ready, and built for the kind of scale only a frontier AI product sees.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• - BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline, with industry experience.
• - 3+ years as a software engineer, with proven contributions to team-based, production systems — ideally in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary environment.
• - Solid programming skills in C/C++ and/or Python, with a strong grasp of data structures and algorithms.
• - Comfort moving across the stack — backend services, user-facing surfaces, instrumentation and tooling — and the engineering rigor to know which trade-offs matter at which layer.
• - Strong sense of ownership and a bias for action: you finish what you start, and you ship.

Preferred Qualifications:

• - End-to-end product engineering experience; B2B or enterprise platform experience;
• - Hands-on or adjacent experience with ML systems, GPU serving, or other compute-intensive AI workloads; distributed systems, concurrent programming, and Microservices.

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:

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;
3. Exercising sound judgment.