Software Engineer Graduate (Global E-commerce-Search) - 2027 Start

About the Team: The Global E-Commerce Search Infrastructure team builds the systems that power product discovery on TikTok Shop. We develop reliable, high-performance services across retrieval, indexing, query understanding, ranking infrastructure, real-time data processing, and AI-enabled search. Our engineers work on production systems used at global scale. We partner with machine-learning engineers, product teams, and other infrastructure teams to improve search quality, system performance, reliability, and development velocity.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, test, deploy, and operate well-scoped components of large-scale search and distributed systems.
• Build reliable online services and data pipelines with attention to latency, throughput, availability, freshness, cost, and maintainability.
• Contribute to retrieval, indexing, query-processing, ranking infrastructure, or AI-enabled search capabilities.
• Participate in technical design discussions, code reviews, documentation, testing, monitoring, and incident learning.
• Use profiling, benchmarking, and production metrics to identify bottlenecks and drive measurable improvements.
• Collaborate with search, machine-learning, product, and infrastructure partners to translate requirements into practical engineering solutions.
• Learn from experienced engineers while progressively taking ownership of larger components and projects.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a Bachelor's/ Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Programming experience in at least one general-purpose language, such as C++, Go, Java, or Python.
• Deep understanding of data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented or modular software design.
• Familiarity with core software-engineering practices, including testing, debugging, version control, and code review.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Technical internships, research, open-source contributions, or substantial academic or personal projects.
• Distributed systems, operating systems, networking, databases, storage systems, or low-latency services.
• Search or information-retrieval concepts, such as inverted indexes, BM25, learning-to-rank, query understanding, vector search, FAISS, or HNSW.
• Data-processing frameworks such as Kafka, Flink, or Spark.
• AI or machine-learning infrastructure, model serving, retrieval-augmented generation, or agentic systems.
• Performance profiling, Linux development, production debugging, competitive programming, or relevant publications.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $121,600 - $243,200 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).