Data Science Manager, Risk Detection - USDS

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.

Team Intro
We are seeking an experienced Senior Data Science Manager to join the Risk and Response - Detection and Automation Team within US Trust & Safety. 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 Data Science Manager on the Risk and Response - Detection and Automation Team, you will lead the Investigations and Insights pillar to drive outcomes for our Detection Engineering Program. In this role, you are responsible for the strategic oversight, leadership, and technical direction of a data science and data analyst team that supports T&S detection engineering deliverables and processes.

Detection Engineering focuses on the creation and maintenance of proactive logic to identify high harm content at scale to prevent harm to users and to the company. This role will work internally with the Automation Engineering pillar within the larger Detection and Automation team, and cross functionally with other T&S teams and Security teams to collaborate on discovery, investigation, and remediation of high harm behavior and content. Examples of use-cases you will help to develop and oversee include finding high harm leakage in areas of youth safety, exploitation and abuse, and violent behaviors, just to name a few. Detections can take the form of SQL jobs, lightweight topic classification models, and even large language model solutions.

Our Automation and Detection team performs a critical function that supports our efforts to address objectionable or disturbing content. Content that this Data Scientist 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
- Lead a team of data scientists and data analysts to discover, investigate, and mitigate high harm leakage on the TikTok platform.
- Act as a force multiplier across the business by optimizing processes and gaining alignment across stakeholders. Lead a team of force multipliers that raise the productivity and efficiency of analysts doing manual investigations and remediations.
- Improve consistency and efficiency throughout US Trust & Safety's Detection Engineering program by architecting and shipping high precision use-cases via SQL and different modeling strategies in Python.
- Ideate, drive, and deliver on a technical roadmap for risk detection at TikTok.
- Work directly with stakeholders to inform, refine, and validate concepts. We ideate a majority of the work we develop, which means capturing need and maturing it from MVP to production.
- Recruit and hire top technical talent while ensuring a diverse candidate pool. Consistently raise the bar on talent across the team.
- Work with cross functional teams globally to ensure alignment, collect feedback on detections, and deploy solutions to get cross functional adoption.
- Raise the effectiveness of tooling and detection solutions through metrics collection, data driven insights, by developing metrics driven objectives.