Software Engineer - High-Performance Recommendation Infra

TikTok Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 388,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok Inc. is seeking a highly skilled engineer to join the Recommendation System Infrastructure team. You will design and optimize high-performance online serving systems powering global TikTok recommendations, focusing on efficiency, reliability, and cross-regional consistency.

The role involves tackling CPU/GPU bottlenecks, cost optimization, and building end-to-end automation workflows for data generation, training, and deployment. Strong systems programming background required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Experience in building scalable backend systems, distributed systems, infrastructure systems, or high-performance online services.
• Strong programming skills in at least one systems programming language, such as C++, C, Go, or Java.
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networking, and distributed system fundamentals.
• Experience with performance analysis, system debugging, reliability improvement, or large-scale service optimization.
• Strong ownership, problem-solving ability, and communication skills.
• Ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams, including infrastructure teams, recommendation algorithm teams, and product/business-facing engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize high-performance online serving systems for large-scale global recommendation systems, improving business ROI, system efficiency, and serving quality.
• Improve the efficiency, reliability, scalability, and cross-regional consistency of recommendation system infrastructure.
• Identify and resolve system performance bottlenecks across CPU, memory, bandwidth, GPU compute efficiency, serving latency, throughput, and resource allocation efficiency.
• Drive cost optimization for large-scale recommendation serving, including business-impact-based cost efficiency, compute resource utilization, and infrastructure-level or strategy-level performance improvements.
• Build reliable and efficient workflows and pipelines for automation on candidate generation, profile generation, feature processing, training data generation, and online development.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

C++/Go/Java

Performance analysis

Cross-functional collaboration

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Flink

Spark

Kafka

Job description

TikTok Inc. is seeking a highly skilled engineer to join the Recommendation System Infrastructure team. You will design and optimize high-performance online serving systems powering global TikTok recommendations, focusing on efficiency, reliability, and cross-regional consistency.

The role involves tackling CPU/GPU bottlenecks, cost optimization, and building end-to-end automation workflows for data generation, training, and deployment. Strong systems programming background required.