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TikTok · 1 day ago

Head of Infrastructure Engineering, TikTok US - USDS

San Jose, CA

Full-time

Onsite

Director/Executive

$257K/yr - $616K/yr

6+ years exp

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video, and they are seeking a Head of Infrastructure Engineering to own the vision, execution, and operational excellence for their infrastructure. This role involves leading multiple teams and setting strategy for the infrastructure powering mission-critical platforms, ensuring high availability, efficiency, and security at internet scale.

Content CreatorsContent DiscoveryMedia and EntertainmentSocial MediaVideo

H1B Sponsor Likely

Responsibilities

Define and execute a multi-year infrastructure roadmap while scaling high-performing teams

Establish a robust leadership operating system and an accountability-driven culture to align technical goals with business impact

Architect and own the reliability of global, multi-region distributed systems

Focus on fault isolation, automated recovery, and ensuring system resilience at internet scale

Manage a production-grade K8s ecosystem, focusing on multi-cluster networking and workload isolation

Drive operational efficiency through automation, self-service primitives, and strict SLO governance

Oversee the strategy and performance of global SQL/NoSQL fleets and modern lakehouse architectures

Ensure data durability, high-QPS performance, and cost-efficiency across all data platforms

Own global traffic engineering and CDN/Edge strategy to optimize performance and security

Build deep network observability to manage complex routing, failover, and multi-region connectivity

Architect large-scale GPU clusters to power distributed training and inference

Focus on maximizing hardware utilization and optimizing the network fabric for modern learning systems

Institutionalize org-wide reliability standards (SLOs) and observability

Lead incident command and systemic remediation to turn operational learnings into long-term prevention

Qualification

Infrastructure EngineeringKubernetes (K8s)Distributed SystemsAI/ML InfrastructureSQL/NoSQL DatabasesNetworkingTraffic EngineeringPerformance OptimizationExecutive CommunicationLeadership

Required

6+ years in infrastructure/platform engineering with significant experience operating large-scale distributed systems in production

6+ years leading leaders (managers of managers) across multiple infrastructure domains; demonstrated ability to scale organizations and deliver through others

Proven ownership of large production environments using Kubernetes at scale (multi-cluster, multi-region); Strong hands-on understanding of networking, load balancing, and global traffic management for high-availability services

Demonstrated experience with CDN/EDGE delivery and performance optimization for consumer-grade, high-traffic systems; Experience running large data/storage platforms including HDFS (or equivalent distributed storage) with strong durability/capacity disciplines

Demonstrated ownership of SQL and NoSQL database platforms at scale, including HA/DR, replication, performance tuning, and multi-tenant governance

Experience building or operating AI/ML infrastructure on large GPU clusters, including distributed training/inference and multi-tenant scheduling

Strong executive communication skills: can translate technical constraints into business impact, investment needs, and risk posture

Preferred

Track record of driving company-wide reliability and platform standardization initiatives (SLO governance, change management, paved roads)

Experience with service mesh and multi-cluster traffic engineering patterns

Experience managing infrastructure portfolios with meaningful budget ownership and vendor strategy (cloud/hardware/network/CDN/database vendors)

Background in performance engineering for tail latency reduction at global scale

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) savings plan with company match

Paid parental leave

Short-term and long-term disability coverage

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

10 paid holidays per year

10 paid sick days per year

17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure)

Company

TikTok

Glassdoor3.4

TikTok is a short-form video entertainment app and social network platform. It is a sub-organization of ByteDance.

Founded in 2003

Los Angeles, California, USA

10001+ employees

https://www.tiktok.com

H1B Sponsorship

TikTok has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)

Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship

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Trends of Total Sponsorships

2025 (979)

2024 (601)

2023 (387)

2022 (322)

2021 (133)

2020 (72)