Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Developer AI

Context: ByteDance’s Dev Infra team is building Dev AI systems to improve software engineering productivity at scale, and this Senior Machine Learning Engineer role supports that mission.

Responsibilities

• Develop and enhance machine learning and large language model systems for software engineering tasks, including code generation, unit test generation, and debugging.
• Build AI-powered developer agents and intelligent workflows that reason over large codebases and use development environments and tools to execute multi-step engineering tasks.
• Support engineers across the software development lifecycle with agentic assistance and tool interaction.
• Improve model and agent performance using prompt engineering, context engineering, retrieval, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, tool-use design, and agent harness engineering.
• Create high-quality training and evaluation data pipelines for software engineering use cases, including data collection, filtering, synthesis, labeling, and hard-example mining.
• Apply advances in large language models, code intelligence, program analysis, reinforcement learning, and autonomous software engineering to real-world developer productivity problems at scale.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or above in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of relevant industry or research experience in machine learning, large language models, code intelligence, AI-powered developer tools, or related areas.
• Strong programming skills in one or more of: Python, Go, Java, C++, JavaScript, TypeScript.
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, machine learning, operating systems, databases, and fundamental system design principles.
• Experience owning complex ML projects end-to-end, from problem formulation and data construction through model development, evaluation, deployment, and production iteration.
• Strong system design and engineering skills, including building scalable, reliable, and efficient machine learning systems or AI-powered applications.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including ability to drive complex technical projects across teams.

Technologies

• Python
• Go
• Java
• C++
• JavaScript
• TypeScript

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or leading AI systems for software engineering, including code generation, coding agents, unit test generation, debugging, or code review.
• Deep experience with large language models and one or more post-training/model improvement techniques such as supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, preference optimization, prompt engineering, context engineering, retrieval, or model evaluation.
• Experience designing and improving agentic systems, including tool-using LLMs, coding agents, agent harnesses, MCP, agent skills, planning, memory, or multi-step execution workflows.
• Experience building large-scale training data, evaluation datasets, benchmarks, or experimentation pipelines for machine learning or code intelligence systems.
• Strong understanding of software engineering and code intelligence techniques such as program analysis, compilers, static analysis, code search, repository indexing, testing, and debugging.
• Publications, patents, open-source contributions, or demonstrated technical leadership in machine learning, large language models, code intelligence, developer tools, or AI for software engineering.

Compensation

• Base salary range: USD 218,400 - 480,000 per year (city-specific, selected city).
• Compensation description: base salary range for the selected city is $218400 - $480000 annually.

Benefits

• Day one access to 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).
• Additional discretionary bonuses/incentives and restricted stock units (role may be eligible).

Location

• San Jose, CA (onsite)

Fair Chance Ordinance (Los Angeles County, Unincorporated)

• 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.
• Company believes criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship on job duties, potentially resulting in withdrawal of a conditional offer.
• Examples of job duties include: interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues; handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to IT systems; exercising sound judgment.

Reasonable Accommodation

• ByteDance is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs, or other reasons protected by applicable laws.
• For assistance or a reasonable accommodation, contact: https://tinyurl.com/RA-request