Research Scientist - AI Infrastructure PhD 2026

Responsibilities

We are looking for talented individuals to join our team in 2026. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Launch your career where inspiration is infinite at ByteDance.

Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by end of year 2026. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.

On the AI Infra Team, you'll be immersed in the robust and scalable infrastructure that powers our cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives. You will work closely with our AI/ML researchers, data scientists, and software engineers to create an efficient, high-performance environment for training, inference, and data processing. Your expertise will be critical in enabling the next generation of AI-driven products and services.

Responsibilities
The ideal candidate should be an expert in at least one of the following fields to define and design the next-gen AI Infrastructure:
- Infrastructure Design & Architecture
- Lead end-to-end design of scalable, reliable AI infrastructure (AI accelerators, compute clusters, storage, networking) for training and serving large ML workloads.
- Define and implement service-oriented, containerized architectures (Kubernetes, VM frameworks, unikernels) optimized for ML performance and security.
- Performance Optimization
- Profile and optimize every layer of the ML stack—ML Compiler, GPU/TPU scheduling, NCCL/RDMA networking, data preprocessing, and training/inference frameworks.
- Develop low-overhead telemetry and benchmarking frameworks to identify and eliminate bottlenecks in distributed training and serving.
- Distributed Systems & Scalability
- Build and operate large-scale deployment and orchestration systems that auto-scale across multiple data centers (on-premises and cloud).
- Champion fault-tolerance, high availability, and cost-efficiency through smart resource management and workload placement.
- Data Pipeline & Workflow Engineering
- Architect and implement robust ETL and data ingestion pipelines (Spark/Beam/Dask/Flume) tailored for petabyte-scale ML datasets.
- Integrate experiment management and workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, Kubeflow, Metaflow) to streamline research-to-production.
- Collaboration & Mentorship
- Partner with ML researchers to translate prototype requirements into production-grade systems.
- Mentor and coach engineers on best practices in performance tuning, systems design, and reliability engineering.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications
- Graduation date in 2026 year with a PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Understanding of infrastructure or systems engineering focused roles, with ML/AI infrastructure.
- Strong programming skills in Python, C++, Go, or Rust for systems development and automation.
- Excellent communicator able to bridge research and production teams.
- Strong problem-solving aptitude and a drive to push the state of the art in ML infrastructure.

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $136800 - $259200 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 withdrawa