Software Engineer​/Researcher, AI-Native database systems

Software Engineer / Researcher, AI-Native database systems

Location:

Seattle

Team:

Infrastructure

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A222953A

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Responsibilities

About the Team Join Byte Dance’s database R&D team, where you’ll build and own cutting-edge database products supporting Bytedance’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. In this role, you’ll have the opportunity to enhance these services in a cloud-native environment, embracing a culture of intellectual curiosity, self-direction, and problem-solving.

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 Senior 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.

• Architect and implement AI-native databases that seamlessly integrate structured, unstructured, and vectorized data.
• Design storage engines optimized for embedding ingestion, multimodal retrieval, and real-time AI interaction.
• Build scalable and distributed vector search systems with low-latency guarantees.
• Develop AI-augmented query processors that leverage large language models (LLMs) for semantic parsing, intent understanding, and cost estimation.
• Collaborate on developing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) infrastructure and LLM agent memory backends.
• Drive innovations in learned index structures, self-optimizing databases, and AI-integrated transaction systems.
• Publish and contribute to broader research and open-source communities.

• Minimum Qualification:
  
  Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related fields with strong systems or AI research experience.
• Minimum Qualification:
  
  2+ years in core database systems, large-scale distributed infrastructure, or machine learning systems.
• Minimum Qualification:
  
  Strong coding and system-level design skills in C++ / Rust / Go.
• Minimum Qualification:
  
  Deep expertise in one or more of the following areas:
  Storage engine architecture (LSM-trees, column stores, HTAP systems) / Vector retrieval systems, similarity search, and ANN indexing / AI infra or model-serving infrastructure (especially for embeddings / RAG / LLMs) / Semantic search, agent systems, or AI-native memory frameworks.
• Preferred Qualifications:
  
  Experience with open-source systems such as Faiss, Milvus, DuckDB, Click House, TiKV, Rocks
  
  DB.
• Preferred Qualifications:
  
  Publications at top-tier conferences (e.g., SIGMOD, VLDB, NeurIPS, MLSys, ICDE).
• Preferred Qualifications:
  
  Familiarity with GCP, AWS, or Azure’s database and AI integration strategies.
• Preferred Qualifications:
  
  Prior contributions to RAG, memory-augmented models, or self-tuning database components.

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $129960 - $246240 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…