Software Engineer Graduate (TikTok AI Search & Visual Search Infra Team) - 2027 Start

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 128,000 - 317,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok in San Jose is hiring a Software Engineer Graduate for a 2027 start date. The role focuses on TikTok AI Search & Visual Search Infra, designing and building scalable infrastructure to power global search experiences and supporting large-scale offline data processing.

You will work closely with ML researchers and engineers on multi-agent systems, RAG workflows, and LLM/VLM inference, gaining hands-on experience across distributed systems and cutting-edge search technologies.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• Strong programming skills and fundamentals.
• Familiarity with Linux and at least one language (C++, Java, Python, or Go).
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize large-scale infrastructure for TikTok AI Search & Visual Search.
• Evolve search agent platform with multi-agent orchestration, RAG indexing, and memory management.
• Deploy and optimize LLM/VLM post-training and inference, including GPU acceleration.
• Build and improve offline document processing pipelines and multi-stage retrieval services.
• Develop scalable data pipelines for billion/trillion-scale datasets across offline and streaming workloads.
• Collaborate with ML, product, and engineering teams to deliver AI-powered search experiences.

Skills

Programming fundamentals

Linux

C++

Java

Python

Go

Problem solving

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Job description

Discover a career that energizes and excites you every day.

@2026 TikTok

Technology

Software Engineer Graduate (Recommendation - TikTok AI Search & Visual Search Infra Team) - 2027 Start

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A72066

Responsibilities

The TikTok AI&Visual Search Infrastructure team builds systems that power intelligent search experiences for users around the world. Our infrastructure serves billions of search requests every day and supports products including traditional search, AI-powered search results, in-app chatbots, and visual search.Our work spans both foundational search engine infrastructure and the rapidly evolving AI Search technology stack. We build large-scale indexing and retrieval systems, multimodal search infrastructure, multi-agent and RAG engines, and high-performance LLM/VLM training and serving platforms.As an engineer on the team, you will have the opportunity to work on challenging problems across AI Agents, RAG, LLM/VLM inference/training, distributed systems, search engines and multimodal machine learning. You will collaborate closely with engineers, researchers, and product teams to help shape the next generation of TikTok Search.We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving.We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth.

• Design, build, and optimize large-scale infrastructure for TikTok AI Search & Visual Search, supporting billions of online search requests and large-volume offline data processing.
• Evolve TikTok’s search agent platform, including multi-agent orchestration, ReAct and tool-calling workflows, RAG indexing & serving engine, and context/memory management.
• Deploy and optimize LLM/VLM post-training and inference, including GPU inference acceleration, SFT/RL efficiency, kernel/CUDA optimizations, and offline throughput improvement.
• Build and improve search engine components such as offline document processing pipelines, distributed indexing systems for billion/trillion documents , feature extraction services, and multi-stage retrieval/ranking services.
• Develop scalable data pipelines and distributed systems for processing billion- or trillion-scale text, image, and video datasets, covering offline computation, stream processing, task scheduling, storage, and data quality.
• Explore emerging technologies in personalized search, generative search, multimodal understanding, reinforcement learning, model alignment, and evaluation.
• Collaborate with machine learning, product, and other engineering teams to deliver accurate, responsive, and engaging AI-powered and visual search experiences.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related discipline.
• Strong programming skills and a solid foundation in data structures and basic algorithms.
• Familiarity with Linux development environment and proficiency in at least one programming language such as C++, Java, Python, or Go.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, with an interest in solving complex engineering problems at scale.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills, along with a strong sense of ownership and willingness to learn.

Preferred Qualifications

• Internship, research, course project, or open-source experience in one or more of the following areas.
• LLM/VLM serving, RAG, or AI agents.
• Distributed systems, storage systems, and large-scale data processing.
• Search engines, information retrieval, recommendation systems, or advertising systems.
• Understanding of search engine concepts such as query understanding, indexing, retrieval, ranking, and result aggregation.
• Familiarity with LLM serving frameworks such as vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM, or agent development frameworks such as LangGraph, is a plus.
• Experience analyzing or optimizing system performance, including latency, throughput, concurrency, memory utilization, or resource efficiency.
• Ability to learn new technologies quickly and apply them to practical engineering or research problems.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $128000 - $316800 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; and
• Exercising sound judgment.

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