What are the responsibilities and job description for the Head of Infrastructure Engineering, TikTok US - USDS position at TikTok USDS Joint Venture?
Responsibilities
As the head of Infrastructure, you will own the vision, execution, and operational excellence for the infrastructure powering a mission-critical, revenue-generating platforms and its supporting data and AI/ML platforms. You will lead multiple teams spanning platform engineering, SRE, networking/traffic, storage and databases, data infrastructure, and GPU/ML infrastructure. This role sets strategy, drives cross-org alignment, and delivers measurable outcomes in availability, latency, efficiency, and security—at internet scale.
Responsibilities:
- Strategy & Leadership: Define and execute a multi-year infrastructure roadmap while scaling high-performing teams. Establish a robust leadership operating system and an accountability-driven culture to align technical goals with business impact.
- Platform & Distributed Systems: Architect and own the reliability of global, multi-region distributed systems. Focus on fault isolation, automated recovery, and ensuring system resilience at internet scale.
- Kubernetes (K8s) at Scale: Manage a production-grade K8s ecosystem, focusing on multi-cluster networking and workload isolation. Drive operational efficiency through automation, self-service primitives, and strict SLO governance.
- Data, Storage & Databases: Oversee the strategy and performance of global SQL/NoSQL fleets and modern lakehouse architectures. Ensure data durability, high-QPS performance, and cost-efficiency across all data platforms.
- Networking & Edge Delivery: Own global traffic engineering and CDN/Edge strategy to optimize performance and security. Build deep network observability to manage complex routing, failover, and multi-region connectivity.
- AI/ML & GPU Infrastructure: Architect large-scale GPU clusters to power distributed training and inference. Focus on maximizing hardware utilization and optimizing the network fabric for modern learning systems.
- SRE & Incident Management: Institutionalize org-wide reliability standards (SLOs) and observability. Lead incident command and systemic remediation to turn operational learnings into long-term prevention.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- 6 years in infrastructure/platform engineering with significant experience operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
- 6 years leading leaders (managers of managers) across multiple infrastructure domains; demonstrated ability to scale organizations and deliver through others.
- Proven ownership of large production environments using Kubernetes at scale (multi-cluster, multi-region); Strong hands-on understanding of networking, load balancing, and global traffic management for high-availability services.
- Demonstrated experience with CDN/EDGE delivery and performance optimization for consumer-grade, high-traffic systems; Experience running large data/storage platforms including HDFS (or equivalent distributed storage) with strong durability/capacity disciplines.
- Demonstrated ownership of SQL and NoSQL database platforms at scale, including HA/DR, replication, performance tuning, and multi-tenant governance.
- Experience building or operating AI/ML infrastructure on large GPU clusters, including distributed training/inference and multi-tenant scheduling.
- Strong executive communication skills: can translate technical constraints into business impact, investment needs, and risk posture.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Track record of driving company-wide reliability and platform standardization initiatives (SLO governance, change management, paved roads).
- Experience with service mesh and multi-cluster traffic engineering patterns.
- Experience managing infrastructure portfolios with meaningful budget ownership and vendor strategy (cloud/hardware/network/CDN/database vendors).
- Background in performance engineering for tail latency reduction at global scale.
About USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.
On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.
Why Join Us
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is 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 bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.
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. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. 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.
Diversity & Inclusion
TikTok 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 TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. 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.
USDS Reasonable Accommodation
USDS 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/USDS-RA
Job Information
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $257400 - $616000 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 withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.
As the head of Infrastructure, you will own the vision, execution, and operational excellence for the infrastructure powering a mission-critical, revenue-generating platforms and its supporting data and AI/ML platforms. You will lead multiple teams spanning platform engineering, SRE, networking/traffic, storage and databases, data infrastructure, and GPU/ML infrastructure. This role sets strategy, drives cross-org alignment, and delivers measurable outcomes in availability, latency, efficiency, and security—at internet scale.
Responsibilities:
- Strategy & Leadership: Define and execute a multi-year infrastructure roadmap while scaling high-performing teams. Establish a robust leadership operating system and an accountability-driven culture to align technical goals with business impact.
- Platform & Distributed Systems: Architect and own the reliability of global, multi-region distributed systems. Focus on fault isolation, automated recovery, and ensuring system resilience at internet scale.
- Kubernetes (K8s) at Scale: Manage a production-grade K8s ecosystem, focusing on multi-cluster networking and workload isolation. Drive operational efficiency through automation, self-service primitives, and strict SLO governance.
- Data, Storage & Databases: Oversee the strategy and performance of global SQL/NoSQL fleets and modern lakehouse architectures. Ensure data durability, high-QPS performance, and cost-efficiency across all data platforms.
- Networking & Edge Delivery: Own global traffic engineering and CDN/Edge strategy to optimize performance and security. Build deep network observability to manage complex routing, failover, and multi-region connectivity.
- AI/ML & GPU Infrastructure: Architect large-scale GPU clusters to power distributed training and inference. Focus on maximizing hardware utilization and optimizing the network fabric for modern learning systems.
- SRE & Incident Management: Institutionalize org-wide reliability standards (SLOs) and observability. Lead incident command and systemic remediation to turn operational learnings into long-term prevention.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- 6 years in infrastructure/platform engineering with significant experience operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
- 6 years leading leaders (managers of managers) across multiple infrastructure domains; demonstrated ability to scale organizations and deliver through others.
- Proven ownership of large production environments using Kubernetes at scale (multi-cluster, multi-region); Strong hands-on understanding of networking, load balancing, and global traffic management for high-availability services.
- Demonstrated experience with CDN/EDGE delivery and performance optimization for consumer-grade, high-traffic systems; Experience running large data/storage platforms including HDFS (or equivalent distributed storage) with strong durability/capacity disciplines.
- Demonstrated ownership of SQL and NoSQL database platforms at scale, including HA/DR, replication, performance tuning, and multi-tenant governance.
- Experience building or operating AI/ML infrastructure on large GPU clusters, including distributed training/inference and multi-tenant scheduling.
- Strong executive communication skills: can translate technical constraints into business impact, investment needs, and risk posture.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Track record of driving company-wide reliability and platform standardization initiatives (SLO governance, change management, paved roads).
- Experience with service mesh and multi-cluster traffic engineering patterns.
- Experience managing infrastructure portfolios with meaningful budget ownership and vendor strategy (cloud/hardware/network/CDN/database vendors).
- Background in performance engineering for tail latency reduction at global scale.
About USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.
On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.
Why Join Us
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is 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 bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.
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. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. 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.
Diversity & Inclusion
TikTok 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 TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. 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.
USDS Reasonable Accommodation
USDS 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/USDS-RA
Job Information
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $257400 - $616000 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 withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.
Salary : $257,400 - $616,000