Research Scientist Intern — Distributed AI-DB Systems

Location:

San Jose

Team:

Infrastructure

Employment Type:

Intern

Job Code:

A158354

Share this listing:

Responsibilities

About the Team Join Byte Dance’s database R&D team, where you’ll build and own cutting-edge database products supporting Byte Dance’s global infrastructure. Our diverse portfolio includes relational databases, distributed caches, key-value stores, document databases, graph databases, wide-column stores, search engines, and multi-model databases.

About the Role We are building the next-generation AI-native database systems—intelligent, multimodal, and designed for the era of large models. Our systems are not just data stores; they’re reasoning engines, retrieval platforms, and real-time memory for AI agents. As a Software Engineer or Researcher, you will be at the forefront of rethinking how databases work when built from the ground up for AI workloads.

You’ll help create infrastructure that powers intelligent systems across Tik Tok, Cap Cut, and future applications that haven’t been imagined yet.

We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship. PhD internships at Our Company provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, as well as to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies.

Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and professional development events, and collaboration with industry experts.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Please clearly state your availability in your resume (Start date, End date).Responsibilities
- Develop kernel modules or features for AI-native database systems.

- Solve unique, large-scale, highly complex cloud infrastructure problems
- Partner with PMs and engineers from different teams on building backend support for AI-native database service products
- Participate in technical discussions related to team's product and engineering work

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or other related discipline.

- Knowledge of database kernel, distributed system, query processing and optimization, multi-threaded programming
- Experience coding in C/C++, Golang, Java, Python

Preferred Qualifications
- Demonstrated software engineering experience from previous internship, work experience, coding competitions, or publications.

- Curiosity towards new technologies and entrepreneurship.

- High levels of creativity and quick problem-solving capabilities.

- Experience with open-source systems such as Faiss, Milvus, DuckDB, Click House, TiKV, RocksDB.

- Publications at conferences (e.g., SIGMOD, VLDB, NeurIPS, MLSys, ICDE).

- Familiarity with GCP, AWS, or Azure’s database and AI integration strategies.

- Prior contributions to RAG, memory-augmented models, or self-tuning database components.

Job Information

The hourly rate range for this position in the selected city is $60- $60.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Interns have day one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits and more. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year). Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing allowance.

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,…