Software Engineer Intern (TikTok - Effects Performance) - 2027 Summer
TikTok, San Jose, California
About the job
About the Team
Creative Effects are a big part of the TikTok experience. From beauty filters to AI Effect, effects make content creation easy, fun, and dynamic — but only when they run flawlessly on the phone in your hand. We are the TikTok Effects Performance Team, powering the system behind every filter, AR effect, and visual effect used by hundreds of millions of creators every day. Our mission is to make effects feel smooth, instant, and power-efficient on every device our users hold, from the latest flagship to the most entry-level phone. If you are passionate about real-time rendering and squeezing the most out of mobile hardware, you came to the right place.
You will be working in the business architecture layer of our self-developed rendering engine — the system that turns effect assets into a fluid, low-power camera experience. Partnering closely with rendering, algorithm, and camera pipeline teams, you'll help profile and optimize frame rate, first-frame latency, memory footprint, and power consumption, and help build the tooling that makes this work scale. Every millisecond and every milliwatt saved is felt by hundreds of millions of TikTok creators around the world.