Software Engineer Graduate (E-commerce Recommendation & Search Architecture)

About the role

TikTok's E-commerce Recommendation and Search Infrastructure team builds and optimizes the infrastructure behind recommendation and search systems for TikTok Shop, working closely with applied machine learning engineers to support scalable systems and innovative algorithms. The Search team focuses on search algorithm innovation and architecture research and development, using machine learning for end-to-end modeling and optimizing distributed and machine learning systems. This is a graduate position starting in 2027.

Key responsibilities

• Build and maintain high-performance online services and data pipelines for TikTok Shop recommendation and search systems.
• Design and develop high-performance computing frameworks and storage systems for e-commerce scenarios.
• Develop and optimize the search engine architecture, including retrieval systems and data processing platforms.
• Ensure production system stability and build distributed systems for massive data and business scale.
• Apply data mining, machine learning and NLP techniques to extract insights from large-scale e-commerce datasets.
• Collaborate with global teams to drive search and recommendation innovation for users worldwide.

Required profile

• Completing or recently completed a Bachelor's or Master's degree in AI, Software Development, Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related field.
• Experience programming in at least one of C, C++, Java or Golang.
• Effective communication skills and a sense of ownership and drive.
• Experience in at least one of personalized recommendations, search engines, machine learning, distributed storage systems or big data frameworks is a plus.
• Preferred: experience in e-commerce, information retrieval, machine learning system development, distributed computing and storage systems.
• Must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year; applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Required skills

• Familiarity with big data open source frameworks such as Hadoop, Hive, Flink, Spark, Kafka, HBase, Redis, RocksDB and Elasticsearch.
• Proficient coding and strong algorithm and data structure skills in C++, Python or Java.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills.