Software Architect - Open Platform

About the Role

The TikTok Open Platform team aims to develop a comprehensive platform connecting content, users, and businesses within the TikTok ecosystem. This team focuses on delivering cross-platform capabilities such as APIs, SDKs, and In-App services to foster greater interaction across TikTok products and enhance business value.

Main Responsibilities

• Define and champion comprehensive architecture for core Open Platform domains, including API platforms, partner integration frameworks, developer experience, and essential platform services.
• Establish technical strategies and architectural standards relating to service design, data models, API frameworks, scalability, monitoring, reliability, and security across multiple teams and systems.
• Conduct technical design reviews and harmonize collaboration among product engineering, infrastructure, security, and compliance teams spanning various regions.
• Diagnose and address scalability and reliability challenges by engineering long-term solutions tailored for globally distributed, high-traffic, low-latency systems.
• Provide mentorship and technical leadership to engineering teams, enhancing engineering quality, comprehensive documentation, and operational excellence.
• Assess emerging technologies and steer pragmatic integration, including platform frameworks, cloud architectures, and distributed data systems.
• Lead cross-team initiatives for architecture planning, risk management, and governance of project delivery.

Candidate Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in software engineering or related experience with extensive ownership of system architecture for large-scale distributed or platform products.
• Demonstrated expertise in designing and evolving service- or microservice-oriented architectures emphasizing high availability, fault tolerance, and performance tuning.
• Profound understanding of API architecture including REST/gRPC, authentication and authorization, rate limiting, version control, developer experience, and platform governance.
• In-depth knowledge of distributed system principles such as consistency, concurrency, caching, messaging/streaming, and resilience across multiple regions.
• Hands-on capability to produce detailed technical designs and influence implementations, with readiness to engage in coding when necessary.

Preferred:

• Excellent communication skills to align diverse stakeholders and facilitate decisions under ambiguity.
• Proven technical leadership showcased via influence without direct authority, mentoring, and elevating engineering standards.
• Experience in constructing developer platforms including public APIs, SDKs, documentation frameworks, partner onboarding, or integration ecosystems.
• Background in security and compliance aspects relating to external platforms, such as OAuth, data access governance, threat modeling, and privacy measures.
• Experience managing global, multi-regional systems and collaborating with teams across different time zones.
• Familiarity with large-scale observability tools (metrics, logging, tracing), Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) methodologies, and incident management processes.

About TikTok

TikTok is a premier destination for short-form mobile videos, driven by a mission to inspire creativity and spread joy. With headquarters in Los Angeles and Singapore, alongside global offices, TikTok fosters a diverse environment where innovation thrives.

Why Join?

At TikTok, creativity is vital. Our global and inclusive teams work collectively to empower authentic self-expression, discovery, and connection. We cherish curiosity, humility, and impactful innovation with a resilient and 'Always Day 1' spirit, striving for meaningful breakthroughs for our users and community.

Diversity & Inclusion

TikTok is devoted to creating an inclusive workplace valuing diverse skills, experiences, and viewpoints. We celebrate the myriad voices of our global platform and commit to fostering a welcoming environment that reflects the communities we serve.