Software Engineer Graduate
TikTok
About the Role
The Global E-Commerce Search Infrastructure team at TikTok builds the systems that power product discovery on TikTok Shop. The team develops reliable, high-performance services across retrieval, indexing, query understanding, ranking infrastructure, real-time data processing, and AI-enabled search. Engineers work on production systems used at global scale and partner with machine-learning engineers, product teams, and other infrastructure teams to improve search quality, system performance, reliability, and development velocity.
As a graduate, you will have 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. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.
Key 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.
Requirements & Tech Stack
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.
- Experience with distributed systems, operating systems, networking, databases, storage systems, or low-latency services.
- Knowledge of search or information-retrieval concepts, such as inverted indexes, BM25, learning-to-rank, query understanding, vector search, FAISS, or HNSW.
- Experience with data-processing frameworks such as Kafka, Flink, or Spark.
- Familiarity with AI or machine-learning infrastructure, model serving, retrieval-augmented generation, or agentic systems.
- Experience with performance profiling, Linux development, production debugging, competitive programming, or relevant publications.