Software Architect - Open Platform

Responsibilities

The TikTok Open Platform team is on a mission to build a platform that bridges content, people and business in TikTok ecosystem. The team focuses on building cross-platform features for both developers and TikTok users, including APIs, SDKs, and InApp services. The platform will enable more interactions across TikTok and its broader ecosystem, enhancing cross-product business values.

Responsibilities:
- Define and drive the end-to-end architecture for key Open Platform domains, including API platforms, partner integration frameworks, developer experience, and core platform services.
- Set technical strategy and architecture standards (service design, data models, API design, scalability, observability, reliability, security) across multiple teams and systems.
- Lead design reviews and align stakeholders across product engineering, infrastructure, security, and compliance teams in multiple regions.
- Identify scalability and reliability bottlenecks; design long-term solutions for high-traffic, low-latency, globally distributed systems.
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers; raise the bar for engineering quality, documentation, and operational excellence.
- Evaluate new technologies and guide pragmatic adoption (e.g., platform frameworks, cloud patterns, distributed data systems).
- Drive cross-team execution for large initiatives: architecture roadmap, risk management, and delivery governance.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualification(s)
- Bachelor's degree in software engineering experience, with significant ownership of system architecture for large-scale distributed systems or platform products.
- Proven experience designing and evolving service-oriented / microservice architectures, including high availability, fault tolerance, and performance optimization.
- Strong understanding of API architecture (REST/gRPC), authentication/authorization, rate limiting, versioning, developer experience, and platform governance.
- Deep knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency, concurrency, caching, messaging/streaming, and multi-region resilience.
- Hands-on ability to produce high-quality technical designs and influence implementation; comfortable diving into code when needed.

Preferred Qualification(s)
- Excellent cross-functional communication skills; able to align diverse stakeholders and drive decisions in ambiguous environments.
- Demonstrated technical leadership: influencing without authority, mentoring, and raising engineering standards.
- Experience building developer platforms (public APIs, SDKs, documentation systems, partner onboarding, or integration ecosystems).
- Background in security and compliance for external-facing platforms (e.g., OAuth, data access governance, threat modeling, privacy controls).
- Experience operating global, multi-region systems and working with cross-time-zone teams.
- Familiarity with large-scale observability practices (metrics/logging/tracing), SRE principles, and incident response processes.