Software Engineer, Ads
Company: TikTok USDS Joint Venture
Location: San Jose, CA
Type: Full-time
Posted: 2026-09-20
About this role
Responsibilities
The ads system at TikTok operates on a massive scale and serves millions of advertisers, clients and influencers across the world. The quality of the ads system depends heavily on the underlying infrastructure that handles massive data. The USDS Ads team empowers TikTok's global monetization by efficiently delivering ads and content on TikTok.
Responsibilities:
- Ad-Serving System Architecture: Design and implement highly available ad-serving systems capable of handling large-scale traffic with low latency.
- Delivery & Monetization Strategy: Develop and optimize delivery strategies for various ad placements to maximize monetization efficiency.
- Core Ads Algorithms & Pipeline: Improve core algorithms and systems across ad recall, ranking, bidding, and traffic allocation.
- Data & Analytics Infrastructure: Leverage large-scale advertising data to enhance user- and ad-level monitoring systems, and build analytical and optimization tools for campaign performance.
- Cross-Functional Leadership: Communicate cross-functionally across various teams, organizations, and internal/external stakeholders to drive engineering efforts. Lead innovation efforts and bring in new ideas and technologies.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical disciplines.
- 3+ years of working experience and extensive knowledge of modern software tech stack, including large-scale backend systems and data pipelines.
- Strong Computer Science fundamentals (algorithms, data structures, software design), coding skills, and problem-solving skills.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Strong programming expertise, including debugging and performance optimization in general-purpose languages.
- Experience building or maintaining large-scale advertising infrastructure or similar high-throughput, low-latency systems.
- Excellent teamwork and communication skills, with a strong sense o...