Key skills
AISaaSLeadership
About this role
About the Corporate Strategy Team
ByteDance's Corporate Strategy group is a small team of 8-10 people split between the United States and China. We serve as a thought partner to the management team, dedicating our time to answering the company's most important strategic questions and keeping the company sensitive to external changes. Our mandate includes the following:
• Working closely with leaders across our business units, including TikTok, Al Effort, E-commerce, Local Services etc. to identify and answer key questions critical to the core business model, diagnose issues, influence the strategic direction of the product and help make key tradeoffs and decisions.
• Developing knowledge that helps the management team make better decisions over time. We stay close to the performance and progress on key strategic priorities of other major tech companies, carry out historical deep dives of various internet sectors and verticals across the technology stack e.g. Semis, Hardware, Operating Systems, build relationships with founders, investors, and researchers, and monitor macro trends that could impact our business.
If you enjoy switching between technical deep dives and executive-level discussions, and want to influence the direction of one of the world's largest tech companies, our team offers that opportunity.
Role Summary
Bring your engineering toolkit and first principles thinking to inform strategic decisions across ByteDance's AI initiatives. You will build a hands-on understanding of new models and developer tools, translate technical breakthroughs into clear business recommendations, and advise leadership on product roadmaps, partnerships, investments, and compute planning.
Working side-by-side with researchers, product managers, and executives, you will ensure our Al strategy remains technically sound and commercially compelling.
Key Responsibilities
1. Drive Collaborative Deep-Dive Projects to Guide Al Direction
◦ Partner with researchers, product managers, and other members of the ByteDance Seed Al team to identify and evaluate the most important Al application layer opportunities, including in categories such as code generation, workflow automation, and domain-specific SaaS etc.
◦ Study the market opportunity, core business model and long term attractiveness of the opportunity. Analyze technical feasibility in detail and evaluate alignment with ByteDance priorities.
◦ Synthesize findings into clear recommendations that influence capital and talent allocation.
2. Bring an outside-in perspective
◦ Keep ByteDance current on technical breakthroughs: study pivotal research papers.
◦ Follow advances in model architectures, training techniques, compute economics, developer tooling, and track news from leading research labs. Translate findings into clear takeaways for internal teams.
◦ Engage with the Bay Area developer and research community. Participate in hackathons, DevDays, and Al researcher meet-ups. Build and leverage your network of engineers, founders, and academics to surface insights, partnership leads, and help catch blind spots early for the company.
◦ Carry out in-depth first hand experience of Al products and run hands-on evaluations of developer-facing tools. Help identify inflection points where model capability enables new product opportunities and flag them for investment or incubation.
3. Building Institutional Knowledge
◦ Undertake in-depth analysis of the leading technology companies across the stack, including players at the application, infrastructure, and hardware layers. Become the in-house expert on their strategies, economics, and competitive trajectories.
◦ Conduct historical deep dives on sectors such as semiconductors, hardware, operating systems, and developer tooling. Distill lessons on innovation cycles, business-model shifts, and ecosystem formation that can guide future ByteDance decisions.
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $156600 - $387840 annually.
ByteDance's Corporate Strategy group is a small team of 8-10 people split between the United States and China. We serve as a thought partner to the management team, dedicating our time to answering the company's most important strategic questions and keeping the company sensitive to external changes. Our mandate includes the following:
• Working closely with leaders across our business units, including TikTok, Al Effort, E-commerce, Local Services etc. to identify and answer key questions critical to the core business model, diagnose issues, influence the strategic direction of the product and help make key tradeoffs and decisions.
• Developing knowledge that helps the management team make better decisions over time. We stay close to the performance and progress on key strategic priorities of other major tech companies, carry out historical deep dives of various internet sectors and verticals across the technology stack e.g. Semis, Hardware, Operating Systems, build relationships with founders, investors, and researchers, and monitor macro trends that could impact our business.
If you enjoy switching between technical deep dives and executive-level discussions, and want to influence the direction of one of the world's largest tech companies, our team offers that opportunity.
Role Summary
Bring your engineering toolkit and first principles thinking to inform strategic decisions across ByteDance's AI initiatives. You will build a hands-on understanding of new models and developer tools, translate technical breakthroughs into clear business recommendations, and advise leadership on product roadmaps, partnerships, investments, and compute planning.
Working side-by-side with researchers, product managers, and executives, you will ensure our Al strategy remains technically sound and commercially compelling.
Key Responsibilities
1. Drive Collaborative Deep-Dive Projects to Guide Al Direction
◦ Partner with researchers, product managers, and other members of the ByteDance Seed Al team to identify and evaluate the most important Al application layer opportunities, including in categories such as code generation, workflow automation, and domain-specific SaaS etc.
◦ Study the market opportunity, core business model and long term attractiveness of the opportunity. Analyze technical feasibility in detail and evaluate alignment with ByteDance priorities.
◦ Synthesize findings into clear recommendations that influence capital and talent allocation.
2. Bring an outside-in perspective
◦ Keep ByteDance current on technical breakthroughs: study pivotal research papers.
◦ Follow advances in model architectures, training techniques, compute economics, developer tooling, and track news from leading research labs. Translate findings into clear takeaways for internal teams.
◦ Engage with the Bay Area developer and research community. Participate in hackathons, DevDays, and Al researcher meet-ups. Build and leverage your network of engineers, founders, and academics to surface insights, partnership leads, and help catch blind spots early for the company.
◦ Carry out in-depth first hand experience of Al products and run hands-on evaluations of developer-facing tools. Help identify inflection points where model capability enables new product opportunities and flag them for investment or incubation.
3. Building Institutional Knowledge
◦ Undertake in-depth analysis of the leading technology companies across the stack, including players at the application, infrastructure, and hardware layers. Become the in-house expert on their strategies, economics, and competitive trajectories.
◦ Conduct historical deep dives on sectors such as semiconductors, hardware, operating systems, and developer tooling. Distill lessons on innovation cycles, business-model shifts, and ecosystem formation that can guide future ByteDance decisions.
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $156600 - $387840 annually.