Senior Software Engineer (Backend) - TikTok Open Platform

Description

The TikTok Open Platform team builds the foundational platform capabilities and infrastructure connecting TikTok's massive ecosystem with developers, enterprise merchants, and third-party partners. We focus on high-concurrency architecture, API gateways, tenant isolation, security/compliance, and next-generation AI-enabled platform services.

Responsibilities
- System Architecture & Evolution: Responsible for the architecture design, development, and evolution of B2B server-side services for TikTok Open Platform, creating standardized, reusable platform capabilities for developers and ecosystem partners.
- Domain Modeling & Storage Architecture: Design core domain models and storage layers. Formulate data partition strategies, read/write pipelines, hot/cold data tiering, capacity planning, and performance optimization according to business growth.
- Ecosystem Openness & Security Control: Build open capability frameworks including API gateways, authentication, RBAC/ABAC permissions, multi-tenant isolation, quota/rate limiting, audit logging, and risk controls to ensure platform security and compliance.
- Distributed Systems Reliability: Design and deploy high-availability, scalable distributed systems. Implement crucial mechanisms for consistency, idempotency, fault tolerance, circuit breaking, degradation, async processing, and disaster recovery.
- AI-Assisted Engineering Practice: Leverage AI programming tools and Agent capabilities (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to scale up engineering efficiency across requirement analysis, schema design, coding, testing, Code Review, documentation, and live incident troubleshooting.
- AI-Native Platform Capabilities: Participate in building open capabilities for AI-native scenarios, including Agent-friendly API design/semantic descriptions, MCP/Tool integration, context/knowledge feed pipelines, AI traffic auditing, and token cost governance.
- Technical Governance: Lead complex online issue diagnosis, continuously improve system observability and fault recovery efficiency, and take ownership of core SLA and long-term tech debt.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications
- Experience & Level: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related fields, with 5+ years of server-side software engineering experience. Background in B2B systems, open platforms, or large-scale developer platforms preferred. (Targeting Senior/L3 level).
- Language & Core Tech: Solid mastery of Golang, Java, or Python, with a deep understanding of concurrent programming, network models, and runtime mechanisms.
- Data & Storage Expertise: In-depth knowledge of relational databases, NoSQL, caches, and search engines. Practical experience in indexing design, sharding, database migration, capacity assessment, and performance tuning.
- Distributed Systems: Strong understanding of distributed system fundamentals, including consensus, availability, idempotency, retry mechanisms, message reliability, rate limiting, and circuit breaking.
- AI Tooling & Practical Knowledge: Experience incorporating AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) into daily development workflows. Understanding of LLM concepts, RAG, Function Calling, Agents, and MCP boundaries to judge appropriate AI integration scenarios.
- Execution & Ownership: Excellent problem-solving, communication, and cross-team project driving capabilities.

Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Open APIs, OAuth, API Gateways, billing/quota systems, or developer ecosystem infrastructure.
- Hands-on experience in large-scale data governance, multi-region/multi-active deployment, or high-concurrency core backend pipelines.
- Experience building LLM applications, Agent engineering, MCP Servers, or AI Gateways (model routing, token/cost metering, content safety).