Senior Software Engineer – Global E-Commerce Search Infrastructure; TikTok Shop

About the Team

Search is no longer just a feature—it is the defining battleground that will determine whether Tik Tok Shop becomes the first truly global e‑commerce super‑app. Our Search platform is the core engine behind the “shelf‑field” (product card) strategy, and the key to competing head‑to‑head with Amazon, Taobao, and Pinduoduo in a global market worth over $10 trillion. Search will propel Tik Tok Shop from tens of billions to hundreds of billions in annual GMV by activating real shopping intent, unlocking zero‑sales products, and ensuring every item becomes instantly discoverable the moment a user types or taps.

We innovate where extreme performance, massive global scale, and uncompromising consistency meet.

• Core Search Engine Development: Design and implement high-performance online retrieval systems. Optimize core components including the inverted index, vector retrieval (ANN/HNSW), query understanding, and merger logic.
• Real‑Time Data Pipelines: Build highly scalable and fault-tolerant data pipelines using Flink, Kafka, and Spark to ensure product changes (price, stock, and new listings) are reflected in search results in near real‑time.
• System Stability & Performance: Drive latency, throughput, and cost optimizations for services handling hundreds of thousands of QPS. Troubleshoot complex distributed system issues, manage cross‑region failover, and design high‑availability disaster recovery solutions.
• Large‑Scale Storage & Retrieval: Design and optimize distributed storage libraries (based on Rocks
  
  DB/Redis) and columnar databases tailored for high‑speed e‑commerce feature retrieval.
• ML Infrastructure
  
  Collaboration:
  
  Work closely with Algorithm/ML Engineers to product ionize state‑of‑the‑art Large Language Models (LLMs), AI Search, and multi‑modal search models, ensuring the infrastructure supports massive model serving and real‑time feature engineering.