The embedded Trust and Safety team at TikTok is looking for a Senior Engineering Lead to guide the strategy and technical direction for proactive risk detection initiatives, focusing on high-harm, high-risk issues where traditional training data is insufficient. The role aims to evolve current detection systems towards more predictive, subject-agnostic models using LLMs and AI.
Requirements
- Deeply curious about the capabilities of LLMs and AI
- Experience working on Trust & Safety, detection, security, or integrity systems
- Familiarity with emerging threat models, adversarial behaviors, or large-scale abuse mitigation
- Exposure to ML- or LLM-powered internal tools (e.g., RAG pipelines, classifier integrations)
- A strong background as a senior, front-end, or full-stack engineer with excellent technical judgment and deep architectural understanding.
- Proven experience leading and influencing engineering teams towards successful project delivery.
- Demonstrated ability to align technical efforts with strategic priorities and adeptly guide teams through ambiguous problem spaces.
Responsibilities
- Provide technical vision for the team, effectively framing complex problems, defining project scope, and ensuring tight feedback loops with users.
- Raise technical quality standards across the team, particularly for React-based frontends and scalable backend patterns (Python, Golang).
- Guide the team in prioritizing and executing initiatives, translating creative ideas into aligned, high-impact solutions that directly support broader business goals.
- Identify and explore innovative solutions, especially those leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), to evolve our current bespoke detection systems towards more predictive, subject-agnostic models.
- Mentor and guide data and engineering team on technical growth and career development, providing regular feedback.
- Align team efforts with business priorities and enforce execution discipline to ensure high impact.
- Partner with cross-functional teams to define, prioritize, and deliver high-impact engineering solutions.
Other
- Ensure team well-being and psychological safety when navigating exposure to sensitive or disturbing content, balancing velocity with care.
- Strong product instincts and user empathy, particularly in environments where dedicated product management may be lean.
- Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, capable of influencing both engineers and cross-functional partners.
- Experience in high-velocity environments, with a talent for enforcing focus while maintaining team momentum.
- Your ability to work in a high tempo environment, adapt, respond to day-to-day challenges of the role.
- Your resilience and commitment to self-care to manage the emotional demands of the role.
