Software Engineer – Global E-Commerce Search Infrastructure (TikTok Shop)
TikTok, Seattle, Washington
About the job
We're building the next-generation AI search and shopping assistant for TikTok Shop, TikTok's global commerce platform, — powering Q&A cards, in-app chatbot, and visual search experiences that help billions of users discover products, explore stores, and shop through natural conversation. Our team owns the full search stack: from retrieval and ranking to multi-agent LLM engines, post-training infrastructure, and personalized memory. We translate cutting-edge research into production systems at global scale, with a focus on relevance, latency, and fast algorithm iteration.
Responsibilities
- Build AI Search Agents: Design and ship ReAct-based agents with planning, memory, and tool use; implement DAG workflows and RAG pipelines for multi-turn shopping assistance and query understanding. Own the unified Agent Harness across Q&A cards, in-app chatbot, and visual search surfaces — with MCP tool-chain integration and end-to-end A/B support.
- Improve LLM Query Understanding: Drive multi-turn conversation, cross-lingual analysis, and LLM reasoning chains for accurate, trustworthy search results; optimize answer generation pipelines (quantization, KV cache, continuous batching) for quality and latency.