Senior Software Engineer, AI Infrastructure - Developer Tooling

Senior Software Engineer, AI Infrastructure - Developer Tooling

Location: San Jose

Team: Technology

Employment Type: Regular

Job Code: A220576

Retrieval Systems (RAG Infrastructure)

• Design and scale retrieval pipelines including vector search, BM25, and hybrid retrieval strategies.
• Build and optimize embedding pipelines, chunking strategies, and re-ranking systems.
• Develop query understanding and rewriting components to improve retrieval relevance.
• Manage vector database infrastructure at production scale.

Coding Agent Development

• Build agent architectures that support multi-step code generation, refactoring, debugging, and diagnostics.
• Implement tool-use patterns (function calling, code execution sandboxing, file system interaction).
• Develop context management strategies for long-form code understanding.

Evaluation & Benchmarking

• Design and maintain evaluation frameworks for retrieval quality and agent task completion.
• Build custom benchmark suites for real-world coding task assessment.
• Create reproducible testing infrastructure with automated regression detection.

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $212,800 - $387,600 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:

Byte Dance is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at