Senior Software Engineering Lead, Trust & Safety - USDS

This role performs a critical function that supports our efforts to address objectionable or disturbing content. Content that this role 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
- 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.
- 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).
- Clarify ambiguous challenges, drive accountability for results, and champion impact over mere output.
- Ensure team well-being and psychological safety when navigating exposure to sensitive or disturbing content, balancing velocity with care.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications
- Proven experience leading and influencing engineering teams towards successful project delivery.
- A strong background as a senior, front-end, or full-stack engineer with excellent technical judgment and deep architectural understanding.
- Demonstrated ability to align technical efforts with strategic priorities and adeptly guide teams through ambiguous problem spaces.
- 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.
- Deeply curious about the capabilities of LLMs and AI

Preferred Qualifications
- 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)
- 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.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $187040 - $359720 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate's qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. Exercising sound judgment.

Client-provided location(s): New York, NY

Job ID: TikTok-7536307775551965447

Employment Type: OTHER

Posted: 2025-08-13T02:39:20