Senior Software Engineer - 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.

About the Team
We are seeking an experienced Senior Engineer to join the Risk and Response organization within US Trust & Safety (T&S). TikTok T&S helps ensure that our global community is safe and empowered to create and enjoy content across all of our applications.
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Risk and Response Detection and Optimization team you will ideate and develop tools, iterating on them from an MVP to production state. You will also help to drive our Detection Engineering program where we catch high harm leakage at scale on the platform. You will work cross functionally with other Trust and Safety teams and Security teams to collaborate on threat initiatives and tune tools to identify false positives and potential false negatives. You will partner with other functions to identify areas that could benefit from automation and develop technologies to streamline processes. Examples of things you may ship include an intuitive threat-intelligence platform, a workflow engine for submitting and tracking case batches, or a knowledge discovery aid backed by large language models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

This role may be exposed to harmful content as part of their core day-to-day functions, as well as in project work; in response to escalation requests; or by chance.

Some content viewed my violate our community guidelines which include but are not limited to bullying; hate speech; child abuse; sexual assault; torture; bestiality; self-harm; suicide; and murder.

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:
- Improve consistency and efficiency throughout US Trust & Safety by architecting and shipping compelling and usable tools with React, Python, and Golang.
- Work directly with users to inform, refine, and validate concepts. We ideate a majority of the work we develop, which means capturing a user's need and maturing it from MVP to production.
- Catch high harm content and behavioral leakage at scale by crafting lightweight models in Python and SQL for our Detection Engineering program.
- Participate in hackathons, monthly product demos, and quarterly on-sites.
- Raise the effectiveness of tooling and detection solutions through metrics collection and insights.

Qualifications

- You have been building applications for over 4 years and know the systems you've worked on inside and out.
- Fluency in Python.
- Proficiency in relational database technologies (e.g. MySQL) and NoSQL database technologies (e.g. MongoDB).
- You have prior experience in Frontend development, Site Reliability Engineering, Data Engineering or Machine Learning.

Preferred qualifications
- Experience working in a Trust and Safety team.
- Knowledge of social media processes and products, as well as current gaps that can be exploited by threat actors.
- You stay up to date on online deceptive and manipulative behavior. You have a working knowledge of the signals of specific threat actors, their cross-platform tactics, and how they evolve or change over time.
- You're skilled at articulating technical concepts to a broad range o