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Current · January 2026 — Present

TikTok USDS JV

Software Engineer · Big Data Platform

Full-time San Jose, CA Big Data Infra
The short version: I returned full-time to the same Big Data Platform team I interned on in Summer 2025. Today, that team lives inside the TikTok USDS Joint Venture — the majority-American entity established in January 2026 alongside Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX to operate TikTok's U.S. business under federal data-security requirements.

What I work on

I'm a Software Engineer on the Big Data Platform team. Day-to-day, I own and operate the distributed systems that store and crunch data for TikTok's U.S. analytics — at the ~200 petabyte scale. The work spans cluster management, query performance, capacity planning, and the developer experience for the hundreds of internal engineers, analysts, and data scientists running on top of these systems every day.

  • Operate and scale Apache Spark — batch + streaming pipelines processing exabytes a month against an Iceberg / HDFS lakehouse.
  • Tune ClickHouse clusters powering low-latency interactive analytics — schema design, query optimization, replication, and capacity.
  • Run and grow Apache Doris clusters for real-time OLAP workloads where ClickHouse-style columnar speed meets MySQL-compatible ergonomics.
  • Reliability & cost: tightening the slow-query story, driving down 95th-percentile latency, and squeezing cluster spend without compromising SLAs at this scale.
  • Internal tooling: building the platform paved-road — smarter cluster ops, automation, and self-service workflows so analysts and engineers don't need to know the dirty bits.

The scale

~200 PB
Data under management
200M+
U.S. users served
7.5M+
U.S. businesses

About the company

TikTok USDS JV (TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC) was established in January 2026 in compliance with the Executive Order signed by the President in September 2025. It's a majority American-owned entity created to safeguard U.S. user data, apps, and the recommendation algorithm under defined regulatory requirements. The JV is built on the foundation of the pre-existing U.S. Data Security (USDS) organization that the engineering team I'm on has been part of for years.

It serves more than 200 million Americans and 7.5 million U.S. businesses, with Oracle as Trusted Security Partner and an independent, majority-American board of directors.

From intern to full-time

I joined the team as a Software Engineer Intern in Summer 2025, returned in January 2026 as a full-time engineer, and have been heads-down on it since. Same team, same problems, just bigger surface area and more ownership.