ByteDance
Senior Software Engineer - Search & Vector Database Infrastructure
Seattle, Washington · Senior · Full-time · Posted Oct 28, 2026
- Experience
- No overall years requirement stated; preferred qualifications include 5 years in either of two specified areas.
- Education
- B.S. in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related field.
About the job
Develops and optimizes scalable search and vector database products, including full-text, vector, and hybrid retrieval systems.
What you'll do
- Evolve Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and Milvus products for high-performance, scalable search and vector retrieval.
- Develop full-text, vector, hybrid, filtered, multi-vector, and large-scale ANN search capabilities.
- Optimize vector indexing and distributed retrieval across algorithms, storage, caching, and I/O; explore cloud-native search over data lakes and object storage.
What they ask for
- B.S. in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related field.
- Strong software engineering skills in C++, Golang, Java, or Python.
- Experience with search engines, databases, storage systems, or distributed systems; hands-on Elasticsearch/OpenSearch or Milvus experience in production or system development.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and performance optimization.
Nice to have
- Deep experience with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Lucene, Milvus/Knowhere, or similar systems; knowledge of full-text search, vector indexing, and ANN algorithms.
- 5 years optimizing billion-scale or larger vector retrieval, or 5 years with cloud-native storage, compute-storage separation, object storage, or lakehouse/lakebase architectures.
Tools
C++, Golang, Java, Python, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Milvus, Lucene
AI focus
Builds infrastructure for GenAI applications and next-generation Agentic Search, including RAG, AI-powered search, multimodal retrieval, and vector search.
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