Software Engineer Intern (TikTok - Shoot Experience Optimization) - 2027 Summer
TikTok, San Jose, California
About the job
About the Team
Every TikTok video starts the same way: someone opens the camera. That moment — and everything that follows, from framing a shot to switching effects to hitting record — has to feel instant and effortless. We are the TikTok Camera Client Team, responsible for the experience and performance of the creation entry point used by hundreds of millions of people every day. Our mission is to make the camera fast to open, fluid to touch, and rock-solid on every device our users hold, from the latest flagship to the most entry-level phone. If you care about how an app actually feels in the hand, and about the engineering underneath that makes it feel that way, you came to the right place.
You will be working on two sides of the same problem. On the experience side, you'll help refine how creation feels — responsiveness of capture, smoothness of effect switching, gestures, and transitions — turning rough edges into flows that feel natural. On the performance side, you'll attack what quietly ruins that feeling at scale: slow cold start, jank, memory pressure, power drain, and stability issues on low-end devices. Partnering closely with product, design, and the effects and camera pipeline teams, you'll help build the tooling that makes this work measurable and repeatable. Small wins here are multiplied by hundreds of millions of daily creation sessions.