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.