Research Intern; AI-Native Databases PhD

Join us as we work together to inspire creativity and enrich life around the globe.

Seattle

Technology

Intern

A199954A

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).

• 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

• Currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or other related fields
• Knowledge of database kernel, distributed system, query processing and optimization, multi-threaded programming
• Experience coding in C/C++, Golang, Java, Python

• 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 top-tier 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.

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 – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.

As Byte Dancers, we strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and…