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About This Role
Backend
Senior AI Software Engineer - Creative AI Agents - TikTok
Location :
San Jose
Employment Type :
Regular
Job Code :
A221395
Responsibilities
Team Introduction: The AIGE (AI-Generated Effects) team is building AI-native creative tools that enable TikTok creators to turn natural-language and multimodal ideas into high-quality, interactive effects. By combining agentic AI, multimodal foundation models, generative 2D/3D technologies, and professional effect-authoring tools, we aim to make advanced effect creation simple and accessible to everyone—significantly narrowing the gap between an idea and a polished, playable creative experience. We are looking for a Tech Lead AI Software Engineer to join the TikTok AIGE team! Working at the intersection of Generative AI and Graphics, you will set the technical direction and own the end-to-end delivery of the next-generation AI Effect Generation system. You will partner with product, design, engineering, and AI/ML teams to turn ambiguous creator and platform needs into reliable technologies and intuitive experiences, from early research and prototyping through launch and long-term evolution, empowering millions of TikTok creators. Responsibilities: - Define the technical vision and roadmap for TikTok's AR Effect Generation AI system, identifying high-impact research opportunities and land in impactful TikTok 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, controllability, 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.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications: - B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or a related technical field, with 4+ years of relevant industry experience; 1+ years of experience working with LLM/AIGC empowered products or tools - Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and system design, with proficiency in at least one of the following programming languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, C/C++, or Python. - Familiarity with modern web front-end technologies such as TypeScript, JavaScript, React, or similar frameworks. - Demonstrated experience leading the technical design and end-to-end delivery of complex, cross-functional AI or software products, including taking ambiguous or 0-to-1 initiatives into production. - Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical trade-offs and AI system behavior to different audiences and influence technical and product direction across teams. Preferred Qualifications: - M.S. or Ph.D. with a specialization in AI, machine learning, computer graphics, or a related field. - Track record of conducting advanced research and successfully landing new technologies in large-scale, user-facing products - Experience building and operating end-to-end generative AI systems, including but not limited to data, training, evaluation, context engineering, experimentation, observability, and quality-monitoring pipelines. - Experience applying large language models, multimodal models, RAG, tool calling, multi-step agents, prompt engineering, or agent evaluation techniques to creative products. - Hands-on experience building complex web-based creative tools, games, or interactive experiences using modern front-end technologies. - Experience with computer graphics, 3D content creation, real-time rendering, game engines, or VFX pipelines. - Experience building reusable AI platforms or research infrastructure, growing technical talent through mentorship, and raising engineering or research standards across a team.
Job Information
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $218400 - $387600 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.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. 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.
About TikTok
TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok'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.
Why Join Us
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is 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 bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.
We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
Diversity & Inclusion
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
TikTok Accommodation
TikTok 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 https://tinyurl.com/RA-request
Salary Context
This $218K-$387K range is above the 75th percentile for AI Agent Developer roles in our dataset (median: $185K across 15 roles with salary data).
View full AI Agent Developer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI Agent Developers build autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and take actions. They design multi-step workflows, tool-use frameworks, and orchestration layers that let LLMs interact with external systems. This is the frontier of applied AI engineering.
Agent development is where the most interesting (and hardest) problems in applied AI live right now. Making an LLM answer a question is straightforward. Making it reliably execute a 15-step workflow that involves calling APIs, reading databases, making decisions, and recovering from errors is an unsolved problem. You're building systems that have to work despite the fact that the underlying model is non-deterministic.
Across the 9,653 AI roles we're tracking, AI Agent Developer positions make up 1% of the market. At TikTok, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week includes: designing the action space and tool definitions for a new agent use case, debugging why the agent chose the wrong action sequence on a specific input, building evaluation frameworks that test agent reliability across hundreds of scenarios, optimizing the prompt chain for cost and latency, and implementing safety guardrails to prevent the agent from taking destructive actions. The work is equal parts engineering and empirical science.
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
Skills Required
Deep experience with LLM APIs and agent frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen). Strong understanding of prompt engineering, function calling, and error handling for non-deterministic systems. Python is standard. Experience with orchestration patterns, state management, and workflow engines adds significant value.
The best agent developers think like systems engineers. They design for failure modes, build observability into every step, and understand that agent reliability is the product. Expertise in evaluation methodology for non-deterministic systems is the differentiator. Can you measure whether your agent works 'well enough'? Can you find the edge cases where it breaks?
Look for roles that describe specific agent use cases, mention evaluation methodology, and talk about production deployment. Early-stage companies exploring agents can be exciting, but be prepared for ambiguity. The most valuable roles are at companies that have already shipped a v1 and need to make it reliable.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI Agent Developer roles pay a median of $214,400 based on 180 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $228,700. This role's midpoint ($303K) sits 41% above the category median. Disclosed range: $218K to $387K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,275; VP: $235,000.
TikTok AI Hiring
TikTok has 53 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, Research Engineer, AI Agent Developer, AI Software Engineer. Positions span Singapore, Singapore, San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA. Compensation range: $300K - $387K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (568 positions) offer remote work, while 9,010 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,878 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,413 roles, $264,500 median); Los Angeles (1,340 roles, $210,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI Agent Developer roles include Software Engineer, LLM Engineer, Prompt Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward AI Architect, Principal Engineer, Head of AI Engineering.
Build agents. That's the portfolio. Take an open-source agent framework, build something that completes a non-trivial multi-step task, evaluate it rigorously, and document what you learned about reliability, cost, and failure modes. The field is new enough that practical experience counts for more than credentials.
What to Expect in Interviews
Interviews focus on systems thinking and reliability engineering. Expect questions about agent architecture: how you'd design a multi-step workflow with error recovery, how you'd evaluate agent performance, and how you'd prevent agents from taking destructive actions. Coding exercises often involve building a simple agent with tool use and evaluating its behavior across different scenarios. Discussion of safety and guardrails is increasingly common.
When evaluating opportunities: Look for roles that describe specific agent use cases, mention evaluation methodology, and talk about production deployment. Early-stage companies exploring agents can be exciting, but be prepared for ambiguity. The most valuable roles are at companies that have already shipped a v1 and need to make it reliable.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 9,653 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 193 entry-level, 4,500 mid-level, 3,455 senior, and 1,505 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (568 positions). The remaining 9,010 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 roles).
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 9,653 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (7,301), Data Scientist (441), AI Software Engineer (438). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (193) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,500) and senior (3,455) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,505 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (568 positions), with 9,010 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,400. Top-quartile roles start at $264,230, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,605 postings), Aws (916 postings), Azure (724 postings), Rag (634 postings), Gcp (522 postings), Pytorch (495 postings), Kubernetes (384 postings), Claude (383 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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