Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Reliability Team - USDS

Responsibilities

The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team at Tik Tok combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, massively distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. Our team is dedicated to ensuring that Tik Tok’s core services remain stable, efficient, and resilient at a global scale. We focus on enhancing the observability and operability of our infrastructure, using data-driven insights to safeguard business stability 24/7.

• System Design & Optimization:
  Participate in the full lifecycle of high-concurrency distributed systems. Collaborate with development teams to ensure services are designed for scalability, reliability, and high availability.
• Automation & Efficiency:
  Build and maintain robust automation tools to eliminate "toil," streamline service deployments, and manage infrastructure as code.
• Observability & Monitoring:
  Develop and refine monitoring, alerting, and logging systems (SLIs/SLOs) to provide deep visibility into service health and performance.
• Disaster Recovery (DR) & Resilience:
  Lead the design, implementation, and execution of global disaster recovery drills. You will simulate complex failure scenarios and validate failover mechanisms to ensure the platform remains operational under extreme conditions.
• Incident Management & Response:
  Serve as a key responder for high-priority production incidents. You will coordinate cross-functional "war rooms," drive technical troubleshooting, and lead the path to service restoration.
• Continuous Improvement:
  Facilitate blameless post-mortems and perform root-cause analysis (RCA). You will transform incident insights into engineering requirements to harden our systems against future outages.
• Capacity Planning:
  Manage resource allocation and performance bottlenecks to ensure the platform can handle organic growth and massive traffic surges.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g., Go, Python, Java, or C++).
• Strong understanding of Linux system internals, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, Load Balancing), and distributed systems.
• Experience managing containerized environments (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).

• Proven experience in a high-traffic production environment with a focus on incident response and site stability.
• Hands-on experience with Disaster Recovery strategies, including multi-region failover and data consistency in distributed databases.
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code.

Tik Tok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm.

We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.

On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.

Inspiring creativity is at the core of Tik Tok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.

We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire…