Security Engineer (Security Posture Analysis) - Offensive Security Operations - USDS

Responsibilities

About TikTok U.S. Data Security
TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. U.S. Data Security (“USDS”) is a subsidiary of TikTok in the U.S. This new, security-first division was created to bring heightened focus and governance to our data protection policies and content assurance protocols to keep U.S. users safe. Our focus is on providing oversight and protection of the TikTok platform and U.S. user data, so millions of Americans can continue turning to TikTok to learn something new, earn a living, express themselves creatively, or be entertained. The teams within USDS that deliver on this commitment daily span across Trust & Safety, Security & Privacy, Engineering, User & Product Ops, Corporate Functions and more.

Why Join Us
Creation is the core of TikTok's purpose. Our platform is built to help imaginations thrive. This is doubly true of the teams that make TikTok possible.
Together, we inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we all believe in and aim towards achieving every day.
To us, every challenge, no matter how difficult, is an opportunity; to learn, to innovate, and to grow as one team. Status quo? Never. Courage? Always.
At TikTok, we create together and grow together. That's how we drive impact - for ourselves, our company, and the communities we serve.
Join us.

About the Team
TikTok Offensive Security Operation team is seeking a Security Engineer (Security Posture Analysis). This role is highly technical and solution focused. The individual contributor (IC) will utilize their deep knowledge and skills in offensive and defensive disciplines to assess risks and the effectiveness of protective, detective, and responsive security controls against adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) within the TikTok USDS environment. This requires an IC who can work cross-functionally with security monitoring and response teams, administrators, users, and leadership to help them understand the risks and recommend actionable solutions.

To succeed in this role, the candidate must have strong skills in penetration testing or red teaming as well as a deep understanding of threat detection and incident response, threat detection engineering, and/or DevSecOps. The candidate should possess breadth and depth of knowledge in secure coding principles, security architecture, hardening of operating systems, identity and access management, networking protocols, firewalls, databases and middleware applications, threat hunting, forensics, scripting and programming.

In order to enhance collaboration and cross-functional partnerships, among other things, at this time, our organization follows a hybrid work schedule that requires employees to work in the office 3 days a week, or as directed by their manager/department. We regularly review our hybrid work model, and the specific requirements may change at any time.

Responsibilities:
- Execute offensive test cases against controls in the environment: 1) Determine if the control presents risk to the environment, 2) determine its effectiveness against offensive test cases, and 3) provide reasonable and actionable recommendations to resolve risks and improve the controls effectiveness.
- Perform threat modeling against systems and controls to understand underlying architecture and focus on risky areas, develop security testing requirements and use-cases, identify potential threats/vulnerabilities/misconfigurations, quantify criticality to help prioritize and plan for remediation methods.
- Utilize attacker tools, tactics, and procedures to perform analysis and identify vulnerabilities, mis-configurations, and gaps in protective, detective, and responsive security controls.
- After an assessment, consult and provide guidance on recommending solutions around gaps in security controls and control enhancements.
- Synthesize and report findings, develop remediation recommendations, and track implementation through to completion.
- Look for automation opportunities to automate testing and monitoring efficiency of controls on an ongoing basis.
- Operate breach & attack simulation tools to assess the effectiveness of security controls.

Qualifications

- Experience with at least one or more of the following: penetration testing, red teaming, purple teaming, threat hunting, or threat detection engineering
- Experience with reading, writing, and editing code written in various programming languages, such as Go, Python, Bash, C/C++, C#, and Java
- Strong understanding of protective, detective, and responsive security controls: Endpoint detection & response, security information & event management (SIEM), security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), next-generation firewalls, etc.
- Experience in testing Operatin