Investigations Data Scientist, Influence Operations - USDS

Responsibilities
About TikTok
TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok has global offices including Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Singapore, 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.

About USDS
At TikTok, we're committed to a process of continuous innovation and improvement in our user experience and safety controls. We're proud to be able to serve a global community of more than a billion people who use TikTok to creatively express themselves and be entertained, and we're dedicated to giving them a platform that builds opportunity and fosters connection. We also take our responsibility to safeguard our community seriously, both in how we address potentially harmful content and how we protect against unauthorized access to user data.

U.S. Data Security (“USDS”) is a standalone entity 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 user data in the U.S., 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 Trust & Safety, Security & Privacy, Engineering, User & Product Ops, Corporate Functions and more.

We are seeking an experienced Threat 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 Influence Operation (IO) 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 Threat 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 Investigations and Insights team is critical to TikTok user safety, and the Threat Data Scientist 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, 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

• 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. Develop and test predictive models of feature abuse.
• 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.
• Data mine threat actor behaviors and tactics.
• 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

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Economics, Business, other relevant fields, or equivalent experience.
• 3-5 years of experience conducting data-driven 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 understanding of statistical analysis.
• Intermediate in SQL or other relational database languages.
• Intermediate proficiency in a functional or object oriented programming language (e.g. Python, R).
• Basic understanding of Machine Learning Algorithms, Deep Learning, or Recommendation Systems

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience researching or analyzing global Influence Operations (IO) in order to identify, detect, and develop mitigation strategies against IO networks.
• Independently troubleshoot technical issues or bugs
• Rapidly shift priorities based on evolving challenges to the platform
• Identify anomalous behavior and determine ways for further exploring new research leads
• Communicate complex concepts to broader stakeholders without shared expertise
• 2 years of experience leading projects and managing stakeholder relationships.
• Project management skills to ensure impactful output, achieve stakeholder alignment, and manage competing priorities.
• Critical thinking skills with the ability to apply theorems or analytical techniques to discover insights that are not readily apparent

TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

Accommodation Statement
TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at usds.accommodations@tiktokusds.com