Research Intern; AI-Native Databases - Summer; PhD

Position: Research Intern (AI-Native Databases) - 2026 Summer (PhD)
About the Team Join Byte Dance's database R&D team, where you'll build and own cutting-edge database products supporting Byte Dance's global infrastructure. Our diverse portfolio includes relational databases, distributed caches, key-value stores, document databases, graph databases, wide-column stores, search engines, and multi-model databases. About the Role We are building the next-generation AI-native database systems-intelligent, multimodal, and designed for the era of large models.

Our systems are not just data stores; they're reasoning engines, retrieval platforms, and real-time memory for AI agents. As a Software Engineer or Researcher, you will be at the forefront of rethinking how databases work when built from the ground up for AI workloads. You'll help create infrastructure that powers intelligent systems across Tik Tok, Cap Cut, and future applications that haven't been imagined yet.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2026. PhD Internships at Byte Dance aim to provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. PhD internships at Byte Dance provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early. Please state your availability clearly in your resume (Start date, End date). Summer Start Dates:

- May 11th, 2026 - May 18th, 2026 - May 26th, 2026 - June 8th, 2026 - June 22nd, 2026 Responsibilities - Develop kernel modules or features for AI-native database systems.

- Solve unique, large-scale, highly complex cloud infrastructure problems - Partner with PMs and engineers from different teams on building backend support for AI-native database service products - Participate in technical discussions related to team's product and engineering work

Minimum Qualification(s):

- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or other related fields - Knowledge of database kernel, distributed system, query processing and optimization, multi-threaded programming - Experience coding in C/C++, Golang, Java, Python - Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment. Preferred Qualification(s):

- Demonstrated software engineering experience from previous internship, work experience, coding competitions, or publications.

- Curiosity towards new technologies and entrepreneurship.

- High levels of creativity and quick problem-solving capabilities.

- Experience with open-source systems such as Faiss, Milvus, DuckDB, Click House, TiKV, Rocks

DB.

- Publications at top-tier conferences (e.g., SIGMOD, VLDB, NeurIPS, MLSys, ICDE).

- Familiarity with GCP, AWS, or Azure's database and AI integration strategies.

- Prior contributions to RAG, memory-augmented models, or self-tuning database components.