Senior ML Engineer Jobs in California

Location
:

San Jose

Team
:

Technology

Employment Type
:

Regular

Job Code
:

A41505

Responsibilities

About the Role
ByteDance’s Dev Infra team is looking for talented Machine Learning Engineers to join our Dev AI initiative. Our mission is to build intelligent systems that transform how engineers design, develop, test, debug, and maintain software at scale.

In this role, you will work at the intersection of machine learning, large language models, code intelligence, and developer infrastructure. You will develop and improve AI systems for code generation, automated testing, debugging, code understanding, and agentic software engineering, with the goal of significantly improving developer productivity across ByteDance.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and improve 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 can reason over large codebases, interact with development environments and tools, execute multi-step engineering tasks, and assist engineers throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Improve model and agent performance through prompt engineering, context engineering, retrieval, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, tool-use design, and agent harness engineering.
• Build high-quality training and evaluation data pipelines for software engineering tasks, including data collection, filtering, synthesis, labeling, and hard-example mining.
• Explore and apply advances in large language models, code intelligence, program analysis, reinforcement learning, and autonomous software engineering to real-world developer productivity problems at scale.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• 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 languages such as Python, Go, Java, C++, JavaScript, or TypeScript.
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, machine learning, operating systems, databases, and fundamental system design principles.
• Experience owning complex machine learning projects end-to-end, from problem formulation and data construction to model development, evaluation, deployment, and production iteration.
• Strong system design and engineering skills, with experience building scalable, reliable, and efficient machine learning systems or AI-powered applications.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to drive complex technical projects across teams.

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 model improvement or post-training 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.

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $218400 - $480000 annually.

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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.

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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).

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The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

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For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:
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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 withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

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1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

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2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

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3. Exercising sound judgment.

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About Us

Founded in 2012, ByteDance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, ByteDance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.

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Why Join ByteDance

Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.

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As ByteDancers, we strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our Company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

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Diversity & Inclusion

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ByteDance is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

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Reasonable Accommodation

ByteDance is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at

https://tinyurl.com/RA-request