Backend Architect - TikTok Shop (Governance Service)
TikTok
Description
Responsibilities
TikTok Shop is a content e-Commerce business utilising international short video products as carriers. Our aim is to become the preferred choice for users seeking to discover and purchase affordable, high-quality products. We provide users with tailored, vibrant, and efficient consumption experiences while enabling merchants to access robust and dependable platform services in various scenarios, such as live e-Commerce and short video content e-commerce.
Our vision is to make affordable and high-quality products easily accessible, enhancing the quality of life for all. We are looking for passionate and talented people to join our product and operations team, to build an e-Commerce ecosystem that is innovative, secure and intuitive for our users and brands. Governance Service is a global team responsible for ensuring a safe and trustworthy marketplace for buyers, sellers and creators.
We work on risk detection, fairness and sustainability of the e-Commerce ecosystem, content and product quality, and friction-free experiences. Responsibilities:
- Own the architecture and technical direction of a defined sub-domain within TikTok Shop governance, covering both business systems and foundational platforms.
- Understand complex business scenarios, identify long-term system issues, define technical evolution plans, and drive critical projects from goal decomposition through delivery and review.
- Design scalable and maintainable systems, balancing business delivery, platform development, system reliability and long-term maintainability.
- Lead the evolution from business-specific solutions to reusable platform capabilities, making clear trade-offs between common capabilities and short-term customisation.
- Continuously improve existing systems by addressing architectural weaknesses and improving performance, stability and scalability.
- Apply AI to engineering systems or real business problems, and integrate AI coding tools into development, testing, refactoring, troubleshooting or documentation workflows.
- Work across teams and regions to deliver complex, long-running or high-uncertainty projects.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Experience in e-commerce, B2B or complex business platforms, with an understanding of the complexity created by multiple roles, workflows and collaborating systems.
- Experience as the owner of a core system or critical platform capability, with the ability to clearly explain system boundaries, architectural trade-offs and long-term evolution.
- Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering or a related discipline.
- Proficiency in at least one programming language, such as Golang, Python or Java, with solid knowledge of data structures, algorithms and common design patterns.
- Familiarity with the design principles of highly available, high-concurrency and high-performance distributed systems, including common storage systems and middleware.
- Proficiency with AI coding tools and the ability to incorporate them into day-to-day engineering work.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Hands-on experience applying AI to business workflows, intelligent operations, engineering productivity or technical governance, with a clear understanding of implementation boundaries and outcome validation.
- Experience working across countries, languages or regions, with practical exposure to cross-market differences.