Backend Architect - TikTok Shop (Governance Service)

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.