Senior Site Reliability Engineer, AI Infrastructure

About the Team

The USDS JV AI Infra SRE team works with engineering and product teams to build and run globally distributed, fault-tolerant systems for TikTok's state-of-the-art Recommendation and Search engines. SREs on this team will deliver on production ownership, driving observability and automation across complex service mesh architectures. Operating within a highly secure and strictly isolated USDS environment, our team is currently in a critical 0-to-1 infrastructure building phase.

Responsibilities

• Partner with cross-functional teams throughout the entire service lifecycle, from system design consulting and architecture reviews to deployment, operation, and continuous refinement, acting as a strong communicator to align engineering efforts during critical incidents and daily operations.
• Build tools, platforms, and automation to improve service reliability, scalability, R&D efficiency, and operational workflows, while maintaining a healthy balance between deep software development and daily operational duties.
• Ensure high availability and performance of large-scale, multi-region systems by proactively monitoring service health, latency, and key metrics.
• Lead complex infrastructure migrations and system architecture upgrades in a highly restricted compliance environment.
• Drive robust Capacity Management, including resource allocation, stability optimization, and error attribution, while ensuring strict SLA/SLO compliance.
• Drive sustainable incident management, blameless postmortems, and systemic root-cause resolution.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3+ years of hands-on SRE, DevOps, or Systems Engineering experience managing large-scale, highly reliable systems.
• Strong foundation in Linux operating systems, internal system performance, and networking fundamentals.
• Experience programming in at least one standard language: Go, Python, C/C++, or Java.
• Demonstrated experience in designing, troubleshooting, and maintaining complex distributed systems, with a proven ability to navigate production chaos, debug high-complexity traffic issues, and automate legacy operations via Bash/shell scripting.
• Familiarity with modern CI/CD practices and automated deployment pipelines.
• High resilience and strong "system sense", the ability to remain patient and productive in highly restricted or developing infrastructure environments where standard developer tools may not be fully available yet.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience with container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes) and service mesh architectures.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) and Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Terraform).
• Experience with modern observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Distributed Tracing).
• Track record of identifying manual, painful operational workflows and successfully designing/coding self-serve tools or automation to eliminate them.
• Interest or experience in leveraging LLMs, Agentic AI, or advanced machine learning concepts to enhance operational efficiency, automate troubleshooting, or build next-generation infra tooling.

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).

Pay

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $177,688 - $341,734 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.

Schedule

The company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.