Research Engineer Graduate (Agentic Arch) - 2027 Start (PhD)

About the role

The TikTok Agentic Arch team is building AI-native engineering infrastructure that transforms how software is designed, built, and operated at TikTok scale. We research and deploy reliable long-horizon agents that can reason over large codebases, interact with complex tools and environments, and complete consequential engineering work across distributed production systems. Our environment provides a unique opportunity to advance agent research through real-world execution feedback.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year.

Responsibilities

• Conduct frontier research on reliable long-horizon agents for complex, multi-step software engineering and operations tasks.
• Advance agent capabilities in areas such as hierarchical planning and reasoning, memory and context management, tool use, environment interaction, and multi-agent coordination.
• Co-design agents and models through post-training, reinforcement learning, learning from execution feedback, search, and test-time scaling to improve performance on real-world tasks.
• Build scalable agent infrastructure for orchestration, evaluation, observability, and reliable execution across large codebases, engineering toolchains, and distributed production environments.
• Apply and validate new methods in representative workflows such as cross-repository software changes, testing and verification, large-scale migrations, deployment, and incident diagnosis and remediation.
• Translate research into production systems, define rigorous evaluation methodologies, and measure impact through task success, software quality, engineering efficiency, and system performance.
• Collaborate with researchers, infrastructure teams, developer-platform teams, and product engineers to deploy solutions at scale and produce publishable research and broader scientific insights where appropriate.

Requirements

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science or a related discipline.
• Demonstrated research or engineering experience in AI agents or closely related areas such as large language model reasoning, reinforcement learning, program synthesis, or AI for code.
• Strong understanding of one or more relevant areas, including agent planning and reasoning, model post-training, reinforcement learning, memory and context systems, tool learning, multi-agent systems, or agent evaluation.
• Strong programming and systems-building ability in at least one language such as Python, C++, Go, or Java, with the ability to turn research ideas into robust implementations.
• Ability to formulate ambiguous real-world problems, design rigorous experiments and evaluations, analyze results, and iterate from evidence.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work across research, infrastructure, platform, and product teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Evidence of research excellence through influential publications, open-source work, deployed systems, or other significant contributions. Relevant venues include NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, MLSys, OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, ICSE, and FSE.
• Experience building or deploying LLM agents, AI developer tools, or agent platforms in complex or large-scale environments.
• Hands-on experience with model post-training, reinforcement learning, execution-feedback loops, tool-using agents, distributed agent runtimes, or scalable evaluation systems.
• Experience working with large codebases, distributed systems, CI/CD and testing infrastructure, developer platforms, or production operations.
• A track record of translating research into measurable production impact.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $128,000 - $316,800 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies, experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work; this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives and restricted stock units.

Benefits

• Day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) savings plan with company match.
• Paid parental leave.
• Short-term and long-term disability coverage.
• Life insurance.
• Wellbeing benefits.
• 10 paid holidays per year.
• 10 paid sick days per year.
• 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).