Validations Specialist, Trust & Safety - USDS

Responsibilities

Team Intro
The Risk & Response Team for TikTok USDS is a multi-disciplinary team that handles risk detection, prevention and handling in the United States. The team is dedicated to maintaining a safe and secure online environment for users by actively monitoring and responding to emergent threats, ensuring compliance with legal regulations, and addressing real-life implications of online content.

As a Validations Specialist, you will support USDS Risk & Response teams with content and account review, analysis, and enforcement; test and improve threat detection logic; and support testing and implementation of new tools and processes

Our Validations Team performs a critical function that supports our efforts to address objectionable or disturbing content. Content that the Validations Specialist 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.

This team must be comfortable occasionally working unusual business hours (e.g., Tuesday-Saturday or Sunday-Thursday), working late night shifts, and also providing shift coverage during crisis events.

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:
Support Proactive Risk Detection
- Develop and refine harm detection signals: Translate data insights into measurable signals to enhance automated detection and guide manual review.
- Analyze complex datasets: Use various tools to query and analyze large volumes of data (e.g., user reports, content metadata, engagement metrics) to uncover hidden signals.
- Operationalize new insights cross-functionally: Collaborate with data scientists, engineers, policy, and operations to integrate new detection signals, supporting effective and scalable threat mitigation.

Investigate Intelligence Collection Requests
- Review, investigate, and process sensitive intelligence leads with high quality, accuracy, and speed
- Conduct deep-dive investigations leveraging subject matter expertise, policy, tooling, and data to thoroughly assess and validate potential and emerging threats on platform
- Leverage internal tools and queries to conduct "sweeps" designed to identify remove violative content at scale
- Provide summaries/reports documenting results of deep dive investigations

Data-driven decision making
- Utilize data plus internal tools and systems to help Trust & Safety teams analyze trends, identify patterns, and share insights that support process improvements
- Share data and insights that illuminate policy gaps and grey areas, all with the intention of improving policy to enable clear, scalable enforcement
- Test new tools and analysts' hypotheses, and provide precise feedback and recommendations based on data

Expertise in interpreting TikTok Policy
- Interpret TikTok's Community Guidelines and make enforcement decisions based on them
- Stay current on key workflow changes and policy updates that are regularly cascaded
- Leverage unique vantage point to help bridge gaps between Policy, Moderation, and Trust & Safety teams in order to improve policy and process

Detection Engineering Support
- Partner with Trust & Safety analysts to test and improve threat detection models
- Identify intelligence (signals) that improve analyst-built detections
- Support hypothesis testing through validating detections in the development phase

Project Management
- Ensure that action items identified as the result of root cause analyses are escalated to the appropriate cross-functional partners for remediation
- Trouble-shoot internal tooling and programs; support testing and iteration of new tool launches
- Manage and coordinate requests from cross-functional partners; ensure requests are completed in a timely manner
- Support Quality Assurance initiatives to assess the team's enforcement decisions

Content & Account Reviews
- Conduct meticulous review of large volumes of potentially high harm content and accounts, and make enforcement decisions based on Community Guidelines
- Based on large scale reviews, identify and capture new intelligence signals to improve overall detection capabilities; drive real-time insights to leadership and cross-functional partners across Incident Management, Policy, Investigations, Comms, Legal, and other teams

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree or at least 1 year of experience in Trust & Safety, Operations, Content Moderation, or as a research assistant
- Strategic critical thinker with analytical and creative problem-solving skills
- Demonstrated experience as a collaborative team player; you understand the importance of proactive problem identification and covering for your colleagues when they need you most
- Strong communication and writing skills
- Ability to work independently and reliably under tight timeframes in a fast-paced environment
- Strong ability to multi-task and manage multiple competing priorities while working seamlessly across teams
- Open minded thinking about people, cultures, backgrounds, and threats

Preferred Qualifications