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. We are looking for resilient engineers who are comfortable navigating immature tooling and legacy workflows, willing to get their hands dirty with heavy operations today to build the robust foundation and advanced agentic automation tools for tomorrow.

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.
• 1+ 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.

About USDS TikTok

USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps, and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation.

USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale. On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect — and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy — a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make an impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $122,574 - $259,200 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; 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).

Schedule

Fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.