Software Engineer Graduate (TikTok Search Data Infra) - 2027 Start

About the Team

The Search Engineering Team builds and owns TikTok's search engine, combining information retrieval with modern machine learning from NLP, CV, and recommender systems. We embrace a culture of self-direction, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving. The Data Infrastructure team owns the data layer: how billions of videos and articles are ingested and indexed, how features are computed and served, how petabytes of user actions and features become training data, and how long sequences are modeled. Every retrieval and ranking model in TikTok Search runs on data our systems produce.

As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year.

Responsibilities

• Build and own query/video pipelines — ingestion, enrichment, and streaming/batch index construction at billion-doc scale with near-real-time freshness.
• Develop the feature engineering platform: computation, backfill, storage, and serving, with strong online/offline consistency guarantees.
• Build streaming and batch sample pipelines that turn user actions and features into high-quality training data.
• Improve data quality, observability, and cost efficiency across PB-scale storage and compute.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
• Strong programming skills in Java, C++, or Python.
• Production experience with data frameworks such as Spark, Flink, or Hive/Iceberg.
• Solid distributed systems fundamentals, and the ability to debug and optimize complex systems in production.

Preferred Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
• Experience with search, recommendation, or ads data infrastructure.
• Experience with feature stores and training sample pipelines.
• Familiarity with real-time indexing, inverted index, or embedding/vector retrieval pipelines.
• Experience using AI coding assistants and agents to improve day-to-day development productivity.

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 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

• 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).