Investigations Data Scientist, Deceptive Behaviors - 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 subsidary 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.

Team Intro
We are seeking an experienced Investigations Data Scientist to join the Trust and Safety organization within USDS. You will use your investigative and adversarial mindset to help us identify, detect, and mitigate Deceptive Behavior (DB) networks operating on TikTok. You will support a team of cross-functional subject matter experts to data mine threat actor abuse tactics, develop predictive models, and conduct comprehensive proactive and reactive investigations using analytical skills, subject-matter expertise, and regional experience.
The Investigations Data Scientist will have the responsibility to perform social network analysis at scale to discover, identify, and mitigate the most harmful threats targeting the platform. You will closely collaborate with engineers and behavioral scientists to resolve complex threats that reach across topic or feature areas and will require network analysis and the creation of detection pipelines. You will develop actionable recommendations, and continually iterate solutions to scale your impact. The work of the Intelligence & Integrity team is critical to TikTok user safety, and the Investigations Data Scientist will have the opportunity to identify and mitigate the most harmful threats targeting the platform and our users.

Our Investigations Data Scientist performs a critical function that supports our efforts to address objectionable or disturbing content. Content that the Intelligence & Integrity team interacts with includes images, video, and text related to every-day life, but it can also include (but is not limited to) bullying; hate speech; child abuse; sexual assault; torture; bestiality; self-harm; suicide; and murder.

It is possible that this role will be exposed to harmful content on a daily basis.

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
- Investigate and document coordinated deceptive behavior of threat actors, data mine behaviors and tactics to perform threat actor profiling, develop models to extract scalable and explainable signals of deceptive behaviors, and work with cross-functional stakeholders to mitigate and disrupt complex adversarial networks.
- Use all available internal and external data sources to produce actionable intelligence on high-harm threat actors, their networks, and threat organizations in the topic area of Influence Operations.
- Apply structured analytic techniques, data science, and intelligence tradecraft to perform social network analysis of large attribute, ideational, and relational data sets to identify threat actor networks, critical nodes, and kill-chains.
- Work cross-functionally with product managers, program managers, security, operations, policy, and communications teams to address gaps in current threat response processes such as detection and mitigation.
- Collaborate with a team of global experts that respond to known threat actors and proactively build and tailor queries to discover and identify potential threats.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Data Science, Computational Social Science, Data Journalism,