Tech Lead: Generative AI & AR Agent Systems

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 218,000 - 480,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Short-term and long-term disability

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

10 paid holidays per year

10 paid sick days per year

17 days Paid Personal Time

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Tech Lead AI Software Engineer for Creative AI Agents in San Jose. You will define the technical vision and roadmap for TikTok's AR Effect Generation AI system and own end-to-end architecture from design to deployment.

You will lead research and productization of generative and agentic AI techniques, collaborate with product, design, engineering, and AI teams, and mentor engineers while balancing quality, latency, safety, and user impact.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical vision and roadmap for TikTok's AR Effect Generation AI system.
• Own the end-to-end architecture and development of key AI Effect Generation system, from problem discovery and technical design to implementation, rollout, and long-term maintenance; across data collection, context engineering, evaluation, and product integration.
• Lead the research and productization of generative and agentic AI techniques for visual, interactive, and 3D content creation, integrating multimodal models with graphics engines and creator workflows while balancing quality, controllability, latency, reliability, safety, and delivery speed.
• Establish robust experimentation, evaluation, and observability practices—including offline metrics, staged rollouts, A/B experiments, tracing, and quality monitoring, use online results to guide future research and product decisions.
• Collaborate with product, design, engineering, and AI/ML partners to translate ambiguous creator and platform needs into clear technical strategies, align stakeholders on trade-offs, and deliver measurable user impact.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers and researchers, identify reusable abstractions across projects, raise engineering and research standards, and foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, and innovation.

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Tech Lead AI Software Engineer for Creative AI Agents in San Jose. You will define the technical vision and roadmap for TikTok's AR Effect Generation AI system and own end-to-end architecture from design to deployment.

You will lead research and productization of generative and agentic AI techniques, collaborate with product, design, engineering, and AI teams, and mentor engineers while balancing quality, latency, safety, and user impact.