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

Description

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.

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. 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. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.
Candidates can apply to a maximum of two positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you apply. The application limit is applicable to our Company and its affiliates' jobs globally. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early.

Online Assessment
Candidates who pass resume screening will be invited to participate in Our Company's technical online assessment.

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

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.

By submitting an application for this role, you accept and agree to our global applicant privacy policy, which may be accessed here: https://careers.tiktok.com/legal/privacy