Software Development Engineer, Storage Engine

About the Team:
The Byte Dance Database Lava Store team builds and maintains Byte Dance's purpose-built local storage engine for large-scale cloud services. Working at the intersection of storage engines, databases, file systems, and performance engineering, the team solves highly write-intensive, latency-sensitive, and cost-sensitive infrastructure problems that general-purpose systems cannot fully address. The team combines systems research with end-to-end production ownership: it studies real workload patterns from database, key-value, and stream-processing systems, turns those insights into practical storage innovations, and validates them in production at massive scale.

Its work spans LSM-based engine design, KV separation, garbage collection, WAL-oriented storage paths, append-optimized file systems, caching, and tail-latency optimization. Lava Store has already been deployed at very large scale, with over 100,000 running instances, more than 100 PB of stored data, and over 2 billion requests per second, reflecting the team's focus on building simple, robust, and cost-effective infrastructure with measurable real-world impact.

Responsibilities:

• Participate in the design and implementation of high-performance KV storage engines and file systems for large-scale distributed storage & database system backends;
• Explore the design and evolution of next-generation KV storage engine architectures to ensure low latency and high throughput;
• Deeply understand storage requirements across business scenarios, and collaborate with business teams to find the most suitable storage solutions.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering or related majors;
• Strong problem analysis, conceptual abstraction and design skills; proficient in C/C++, familiar with at least one of Python / Shell or similar languages;
• Proficient in systems programming, including system calls and library functions, network/multithreaded programming models, debugging, and IO performance tuning tools and techniques;
• In-depth understanding of storage system architectures and principles, such as LSM Tree, file systems (ext4/bluefs), etc.;
• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including consensus, replication, consistency models, and fault tolerance;
• Excellent ability to identify and solve problems, good communication skills, team collaboration spirit, and a strong desire to learn new technologies.

Preferred Qualifications:

• PhD 's degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering or related majors;
• Experience with asynchronous programming models and event-driven architectures, including callbacks, futures/promises, and coroutines;
• Prior development experience in any of the following: large-scale distributed storage / caching / database systems / single-node KV storage engines / single-node file systems;
• Familiarity with one or more common open-source projects such as RocksDB / LevelDB / Redis / Memcached / Cachelib;
  Prior RocksDB development experience is a plus;
• Prior development experience with storage‑compute disaggregation architectures is a plus.

Founded in 2012, Byte Dance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including Tik Tok, Lemon8, Cap Cut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, Byte Dance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.

Inspiring creativity is at the core of Byte Dance's mission. Our innovative products are built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect –…