Research Scientist - AI Compute & DPU - Global Frontier Tech Recruitment Program - 2027 Start (PhD)

About the role

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2027. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at our Company.

Responsibilities

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by end of year 2027. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

Qualifications

• Minimum Qualifications: Individuals who are completing or recently completed a PhD in Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline, with a focus on distributed and ML systems.
• Proven first-author publications in top venues (e.g., OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, NeurIPS, MLSys, etc.) with clear technical contributions.
• Strong system-building ability, with hands-on experience implementing or optimizing real systems beyond prototypes.
• Solid understanding of compute, network architecture, and operating systems.
• Deep expertise in at least one of the following: LLM inference / AI-ML systems, system optimization for AI (e.g., scheduling, observability, resource management, high-performance networking), or software-hardware co-design.
• Demonstrated ownership of significant technical work (research or systems), with the ability to clearly articulate the problem defined, decisions made, and why the outcome depended on their contribution.
• Strong programming skills and the ability to reason about complex system design.

Preferred Qualifications

• A sustained track record of high-impact research, with evidence of influence (citations, follow-up work, or adoption in real systems).
• Experience taking ideas from research to production, including deployment, evaluation, and iteration in real environments.
• Deep expertise in frontier areas such as large-scale model training and inference, heterogeneous computing optimization across GPUs/DPUs/accelerators, software-hardware co-design (e.g., FPGA/ASIC) across networking/storage/distributed compute, or high-performance networking (e.g., RDMA, NCCL, DPDK/SPDK) with hands-on experience in network virtualization (OVS, SR-IOV, eBPF).
• Proven ability to lead technical direction, not just contribute—e.g., defining a research agenda, owning a system component, or driving cross-functional decisions.
• Contributions to widely used open-source systems or infrastructure projects.
• Strong industry research experience or collaboration with leading labs
• Ability to reason rigorously about system-level trade-offs (latency, throughput, cost, scalability) and translate them into practical designs.

Benefits

• 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).

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (Annually) The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $212800 - $387600 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. The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

About Us

Founded in 2012, ByteDance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, ByteDance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.