Tech Lead, Recommendation Infrastructure
TikTok
San Jose, CA · Posted November 13, 2026
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TikTok has filed one layoff notice in the last twelve months, covering 250 workers, most recently August 2026. These are public filings with state labor departments, and an open role can sit alongside them. See the filings
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About the job
The Recommendation Infrastructure Team is responsible for building up and optimizing the infrastructure for our recommendation system to provide the most stable and best experience for our TikTok users. This team builds stable, efficient, flexible and general-purpose recommendation systems, platforms and data applications to support the rapid iteration and growth of TikTok products.
We are looking for a Tech Lead who is excited to dive deep into complex challenges in the recommendation and big data spaces and be able to provide technical leadership to key projects. You will be responsible for building and leading the TikTok recommendation infrastructure, and have the opportunity to partner closely with a globalized engineering teams in a high-impact and fast-paced environment.
Responsibilities - What You'll Do - Grow and lead a team of engineers committed to creating innovative distributed systems to empower large-scale recommendation and machine learning systems; - Build extremely efficient, scalable and reliable online systems and data pipelines, optimize and evolve the system continuously so as to support the skyrocket increase in both user traffic as well as the data amount; - Work with cross functional teams and key stakeholders to define roadmap, drive initiatives and deliver end-to-end infrastructure solutions to address critical product challenges and improve recommendation performance; - Support TikTok recommendation global development and operation with reliable and scalable infrastructure.
Minimum Qualifications - Bachelor's degree or above, majoring in Computer Science, or related fields; - 5+ years of engineering experience in building large-scale distributed systems with 1+ years of engineering technical leadership experience; - Excellent programming, troubleshooting, and optimization skills in one or more general purpose programming languages including but not limited to: C/C++, Java, Python. - Experienced in at least one area of the following areas: personalized recommendations, search engine, advertising, machine learning infrastructure, distributed storage systems, big data frameworks; - Ability to think critically and to formulate solutions to problems in a clear and concise way; - Effective communication skills and a sense of ownership and drive.