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

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

401(k) with company match

Parental leave

Disability coverage

Life insurance

Job summary

TikTok Inc. is seeking engineers for the AI & Visual Search Infrastructure team in California. You will design and optimize large-scale systems powering billions of search requests, including multi-agent workflows, RAG engines, and LLM/VLM inference.

The role spans distributed systems, multimodal ML, and high-performance training/serving platforms. Collaboration with researchers, product teams, and engineers is essential; onboarding by year-end is expected.

Qualifications

• 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.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize large-scale infrastructure for TikTok AI Search & Visual Search.
• Evolve TikTok's search agent platform, including multi-agent orchestration, ReAct and tool-calling workflows, RAG indexing & serving engine.
• Deploy and optimize LLM/VLM post-training and inference, including GPU acceleration, SFT/RL efficiency, CUDA kernels, and offline throughput.
• Build and improve search engine components like offline document processing pipelines and distributed indexing for massive document collections.
• Develop scalable data pipelines and distributed systems for trillion-scale text, image, and video datasets.
• Explore emerging technologies in personalized and generative search, multimodal understanding, and model alignment.
• Collaborate with ML, product, and engineering teams to deliver accurate, responsive AI-powered and visual search experiences.

Skills

Programming skills

Linux

C++/Java/Python/Go

Analytical problem solving

Communication & ownership

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Tools

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

LangGraph

CUDA

Job description

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.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Candidates can apply to a maximum of two positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you apply. The application limit is applicable to our Company and its affiliates' jobs globally.

Responsibilities

• 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 Qualification(s)

• 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 Qualification(s)

• 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

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

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:

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.