Software Development Engineer Intern(Foundation Software)- 2026 Summer (MS/BS)

About the Team

The Foundational Technology team is at the core of ByteDance’s global infrastructure, delivering high-availability, performant software components and foundational services. We focus on low-level storage and network domains, with ongoing projects including the development of in-house metadata storage engines for ByteDance’s ultrascale Kubernetes clusters. As an international team, we thrive on innovation and collaboration, working with both technical infrastructure teams (compute, storage, databases) and upper-layer business units (advertising, payments, AI) to solve critical system challenges. We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2026. Internships at ByteDance aim to offer students industry exposure and hands-on experience. Turn your ambitions into reality as your inspiration brings infinite opportunities at ByteDance. Internships at ByteDance aim to provide students with hands-on experience in developing fundamental skills and exploring potential career paths. A vibrant blend of social events and enriching development workshops will be available for you to explore. Here, you will utilize your knowledge in real-world scenarios while laying a strong foundation for personal and professional growth. It runs for 12 weeks. Candidates can apply to a maximum of two positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you apply. The application limit is applicable to ByteDance and its affiliates' jobs globally. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. We encourage you to apply as early as possible. Please state your availability clearly in your resume (Start date, End date). Summer Start Dates: - May 11th, 2026 - May 18th, 2026 - May 26th, 2026 - June 8th, 2026 - June 22nd, 2026 Online Assessment Candidates who pass resume screening will be invited to participate in ByteDance's technical online assessment.

Responsibilities

As an intern on our team, you will:

• Assist in designing and developing ultra-performance metadata services, including distributed coordination, locking, key-value storage, and service discovery features.
• Support the creation of automated and disaster-tolerance deployment solutions for virtualized and bare-metal environments.
• Analyze service performance metrics, generate insights, and propose data-driven improvements to enhance reliability and efficiency.
• Participate in technical discussions and documentation efforts, ensuring alignment with team standards and best practices.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a master’s or doctoral degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Strong programming skills in C++ or Go in Linux environments, with experience in writing clean, maintainable and testable code.
• Have a solid understanding of CS Fundamentals: basic data structures (lists, queues, stacks, trees, graphs, hash tables) and algorithms (binary search, quick sort, divide and conquer, backtracking), operating system (processes, threads, mutexes, semaphores, deadlock, paging, segmentation, file system), network (OSI models, TCP/UDP, IP addressing, HTTP, DNS).
• Have a basic understanding of distributed systems (e.g. CAP theorem), databases (e.g. relational vs nosql, transaction, isolation levels), and storage systems (e.g. replication, erasure encoding).
• Able to commit to working for 12 weeks during [Summer or Fall] 2026

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with advanced data structures (LSM trees, B+ trees) and algorithms (Paxos, Raft). *Online courses and books such as MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems and Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) are good study resources for those topics.
• Hands-on or research experience with distributed systems such as HDFS, Colossus, Spanner, Chubby, ZooKeeper, etcd.
• Familiarity with linux system programming (epoll, io uring) and high performance networking (RDMA, DPDK)