Lead Threat Researcher, Influence Operations

Responsibilities

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and its offices include New York, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

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.

The Global Security Organization provides industry-leading cybersecurity and business protection services to TikTok globally. Our organization employs four principles that guide our strategic and tactical operations. Firstly, we Champion Transparency & Trust by leading the charge in organizational transparency, prioritizing customer trust, and placing user needs first. Secondly, we aim to maintain Best in Class Global Security by proactively identifying and reducing risks while enabling innovative product development. We constantly work towards a sustainable world-class security capability. Thirdly, we strive to be a Business Catalyst & Enabler by embodying the DNA of technical innovation and ensuring our Global Security operations are fast and agile. Finally, we Drive Empowered & Risk-Informed Decision Making by providing our leaders with the necessary information to make agile decisions based on risk. In order to enhance collaboration and cross-functional partnerships, our organization follows a hybrid work schedule that requires employees to work in the office for 3 days a week, as directed by their manager. We regularly review our hybrid work model, and the specific requirements may change at any time.

We are seeking an experienced Lead Threat Researcher to join the Threat Management Incident Response and Investigations Team within GSO. You will use your investigative and adversarial mindset to help us identify, detect, and mitigate Influence Operation (IO) networks operating on TikTok. You will data mine threat actor abuse tactics, develop predictive models, conduct comprehensive proactive and reactive investigations using analytical skills, subject-matter expertise, and regional experience. The Lead Threat Threat Researcher 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 Lead Threat Researcher will have the opportunity to identify and mitigate the most harmful threats targeting the platform and our users. In order to enhance collaboration and cross-functional partnerships, among other things, at this time.

Responsibilities
- Identify deceptive behavior of threat actors, collect and analyze signals through data analysis, and work with engineers to improve detection models and develop data driven mitigation strategies.
- 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.
- Build and execute team roadmap.
- 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

- Experience conducting social network analysis for social media organizations, law enforcement, and/or intelligence community agencies.
- Experience should include discovering and correlating high-harm threat actors, networks, and organizations across global markets by performing quantitative and qualitative analysis of large data sets including attribute, ideational, and relational data.
- Intermediate understandin