Senior Software Engineer, AI Infrastructure - Developer Tooling

Responsibilities About the Team

We're building the AI-powered backbone of our developer tools. You'll work on three core systems: a retrieval infrastructure powering our AI products, a coding agent that assists users in writing code, and the evaluation frameworks that measure their effectiveness.

Responsibilities

Retrieval Systems (RAG Infrastructure)

• Design and scale retrieval pipelines including vector search, BM25, and hybrid retrieval strategies

• Build and optimize embedding pipelines, chunking strategies, and re-ranking systems

• Develop query understanding and rewriting components to improve retrieval relevance

• Manage vector database infrastructure at production scale

Coding Agent Development

• Build agent architectures that support multi-step code generation, refactoring, debugging, and diagnostics

• Implement tool-use patterns (function calling, code execution sandboxing, file system interaction)

• Develop context management strategies for long-form code understanding

Evaluation & Benchmarking

• Design and maintain evaluation frameworks for retrieval quality and agent task completion

• Build custom benchmark suites for real-world coding task assessment

• Create reproducible testing infrastructure with automated regression detection

Qualifications Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS, EE, or related field (or equivalent experience)

• 4+ years of software engineering experience

• Strong proficiency in Python (primary) and TypeScript/JavaScript

• Experience with at least one systems-level language (C++, Rust, Go)

• Practical experience integrating LLMs into applications (prompt engineering, context management, output parsing)

• Understanding of agent patterns: tool use, multi-turn reasoning, error recovery

• Familiarity with code-specific LLM tasks (generation, summarization, analysis)

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field

• Contributions to open-source developer tooling, retrieval systems, or coding assistants

• Experience with AST parsing, code analysis tools, or language servers

• Familiarity with rendering pipelines or cross-platform framework architecture

• Experience deploying and optimizing ML models in production (latency, cost, reliability)

About Us Founded in 2012, ByteDance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, ByteDance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.​

Why Join ByteDance Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.​

As ByteDancers, we strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our Company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.​

Diversity & Inclusion​

ByteDance is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.​

Reasonable Accommodation ByteDance is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request​

Job Information 【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $212800 - $387600 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 may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).​

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.​

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:​

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:​

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;​

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and​

3. Exercising sound judgment.​