Tech Lead AI Software Engineer - Creative AI Agents

Tech Lead AI Software Engineer - Creative AI Agents (Tik Tok)

Location:

San Jose

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A101417A

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• Define the technical vision and roadmap for Tik Tok's AR Effect Generation AI system, identifying high-impact research opportunities and land in impactful Tik Tok product features.
• Own the end-to-end architecture and development of key AI Effect Generation system, from problem discovery and technical design to implementation, rollout, and long-term maintenance; across data collection, context engineering, evaluation, and product integration.
• Lead the research and productization of generative and agentic AI techniques for visual, interactive, and 3D content creation, integrating multimodal models with graphics engines and creator workflows while balancing quality, cont rollability, latency, reliability, safety, and delivery speed.
• Establish robust experimentation, evaluation, and observability practices—including offline metrics, staged rollouts, A/B experiments, tracing, and quality monitoring, use online results to guide future research and product decisions.
• Collaborate with product, design, engineering, and AI/ML partners to translate ambiguous creator and platform needs into clear technical strategies, align stakeholders on trade-offs, and deliver measurable user impact.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers and researchers, identify reusable abstractions across projects, raise engineering and research standards, and foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, and innovation.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $218400 - $480000 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

• Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others.
• Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).
• The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

• Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
• Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
• Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
• Exercising sound judgment.

Tik Tok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At Tik Tok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. Tik Tok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Inspiring creativity is at the core of Tik…