Senior Software Engineer - Data Agent & Agentic Search

About the Team: The Search team is dedicated to building a fully managed, one-stop platform for information retrieval and analytics. Deeply compatible with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and Milvus, the platform serves four core scenarios—GenAI applications, search, security, and observability—and provides comprehensive capabilities across full-text search, vector search, geospatial search, and hybrid search. We are also building next-generation Agentic Search products, including RAG, AI-powered search, and multimodal retrieval, continuously pushing the boundaries of intelligent search technology. We are deeply involved in the open-source ecosystem and have contributed hundreds of PRs across the OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Lucene, and Milvus communities. Several members of our team hold key leadership roles in these communities, including Governing Board Member, Technical Steering Committee Member, PMC Member, and Maintainer, helping shape the evolution of the broader search and database ecosystem through sustained technical contributions. On the business side, we not only provide reliable infrastructure for some of ByteDance’s largest-scale vector and full-text hybrid search workloads, but also deliver enterprise-grade cloud search services to external customers through Volcano Engine, helping businesses unlock growth through data. We embrace a pragmatic yet ambitious engineering culture: while continuously publishing innovative research at top-tier conferences such as VLDB and ICDE, we remain strongly focused on real-world impact and commercial adoption, building a comprehensive product portfolio that serves a wide range of search and AI use cases. Our team brings together leading database researchers and exceptional engineers from around the world. We are looking for talented individuals with expertise in search or vector database engine development, distributed systems architecture, or AI model innovation to join us. Together, we will explore uncharted technical territory, define the data foundation for the AI era, and empower both ByteDance and enterprises across industries to achieve AI-driven transformation.

Responsibilities

• Build Agentic Search and Analytics systems that combine planning, retrieval, reasoning, tool execution, and iterative agentic loops.
• Develop multi-source and multimodal search across structured data, documents, images, audio, and video.
• Build a unified semantic layer for heterogeneous enterprise data, including entities, metrics, metadata, and relationships.
• Explore semantic accumulation and self-evolving agents that continuously improve through interactions, feedback, memory, and historical executions.

Qualifications Minimum Qualifications

• B.S in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Strong coding, data structures, and algorithm skills; proficient in Python, Java, C++, or Golang.
• Familiarity with LLMs, Agents, Search, RAG, Information Retrieval, or Machine Learning.
• Strong problem-solving, learning, and communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5 years experience with Agentic Search, Data Agents, RAG, or AI Search through research, internships, or projects.
• Familiarity with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Milvus, Faiss, Qdrant, or similar retrieval systems.
• Experience with tool calling, MCP, Skills, memory, planning, or agent evaluation.
• Experience with semantic layers, knowledge graphs, multimodal retrieval, or large-scale data processing.