Research Engineer Graduate (Agent Systems & AI Coding Environment – Seed Infra) – 2026 Start (PhD)

ByteDance is a pioneering company in the field of artificial intelligence. They are looking for a graduate Research Engineer to join their Seed Infrastructures team, focusing on developing AI coding environments and enhancing agent systems.

What you'll do:

• Build agent harness and execution environments for AI coding and knowledge tasks (code execution, tool integration, sandboxing, system interaction)
• Develop scalable orchestration frameworks for multi-step agent workflows (planning, tool use, memory, coordination)
• Design evaluation and benchmarking systems to measure agent performance across complex, long-horizon tasks
• Improve agent performance via prompting, data curation, and post-training in collaboration with model and RL teams
• Partner with research and product teams to productionize agent systems

What they're looking for:

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Systems, or a related field
• Strong programming skills (Python or similar) and solid system-building experience
• Experience with LLM-based systems, pipelines, or tool-integrated workflows
• Understanding of system design and building scalable infrastructure
• Experience building agent harness / runtime systems or AI coding environments
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems, distributed job execution, and containerized/sandboxed code execution environments
• Familiarity with evaluation frameworks, prompting / finetuning / RL, or large-scale experimentation

Benefits:

• 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
• 10 paid holidays per year
• 10 paid sick days per year
• 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure)