Senior Technical Program Manager, Security & Privacy

San Jose Regular Operations - Project Management Job ID: A174995A to this job

Responsibilities

About the team

The Security & Privacy Programs team helps TikTok USDS Joint Venture turn cross-functional security and privacy requirements into coordinated execution. We work with incident management, security architects, and engineering and functional teams across departments to resolve complex issues that span systems, products, and organizational boundaries.

Our remediation work addresses the gap between containing an incident and implementing the lasting engineering changes needed to prevent it from recurring. We bring technical program leadership to that work: aligning teams on the problem, shaping actionable remediation plans, resolving dependencies, and ensuring that implemented solutions are tested and supported by clear evidence.

Responsibilities: - Engage deeply in engineering problems: Work directly with engineers to understand system architectures, API contracts, data flows, service dependencies, and operational constraints. Review technical proposals, question assumptions, and assess implementation complexity, integration effort, and failure modes.

Use that understanding to help teams solve problems rather than simply track delivery dates. - Translate ambiguity into executable technical programs: Turn complex requirements and remediation needs into clearly scoped engineering workstreams with agreed interfaces, ownership boundaries, acceptance criteria, and resource plans.

Partner with technical leads to sequence design, development, integration, testing, and rollout, making uncertainty and the work needed to resolve it explicit. - Align stakeholders through technical credibility: Build shared goals across engineering, architecture, business, and security partners within the cross-functional departments.

Use delivery data, sound technical reasoning, and a clear connection to business outcomes to secure decisions and commitments without relying on reporting lines or formal authority. - Manage the critical path and make balanced trade-offs: Map cross-team dependencies, identify bottlenecks and schedule uncertainty, and keep the critical path current as technical findings and priorities change.

When delays are unavoidable, compare options such as phased delivery, resequencing, reduced scope, or additional capacity against risk, quality, and business impact.

Align stakeholders on the revised plan and escalate residual risks to accountable decision-makers. - Resolve technical disagreements objectively: Guide teams through conflicts over API definitions, architectural boundaries, implementation approaches, and ownership.

Separate assumptions from evidence, establish shared decision criteria, and use design reviews, targeted experiments, or performance and reliability data to evaluate alternatives.

Build consensus around the strongest technical and business rationale, document decisions, and escalate unresolved trade-offs with clear recommendations. - Drive implementation through validated outcomes: Stay engaged as engineering teams build, integrate, and deploy solutions, helping resolve technical blockers and ensuring cross-system testing and operational readiness.

For remediation programs, partner with architects and validation teams to demonstrate that changes address the underlying failure modes and reduce recurrence.

Provide the resulting evidence and outstanding risks to EIM for its formal closure decision. - Improve engineering delivery practices: Use measures such as dependency wait time, integration failures, rework, and delivery predictability to identify systemic obstacles rather than merely report status.

Improve planning and decision-making practices, communicate actionable risks and options to leadership, and share reusable methods and mentoring that help teams deliver complex programs more effectively.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications: - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. - A strong engineering foundation gained through hands-on software, systems, infrastructure, or data engineering work, with the ability to make substantive technical contributions to solution and delivery discussions. - Demonstrated experience independently leading complex, multi-team technical programs or a portfolio of interdependent engineering initiatives, from ambiguous requirements and planning through implementation, testing, and delivery. - Ability to understand complex system architectures, service dependencies, APIs, and data flows; assess technical trade-offs; and connect proposed changes to root causes and intended outcomes. - Strong program-management judgment across prioritization, resource planning, dependency management, risk resolution, and change management, including securing commitments from teams with competing priorities. - Experience defining measurable acceptance criteria and coordinating technical validation, with a disciplined approach to documenting decisions, evaluating evidence, and resolving incomplete or ineffective fixes. - Ability to influence engineers, architects, and senior stakeholders without direct reporting authority, communicate clearly across technical and nontechnical audiences, and remain accountable for resolving difficult cross-functional problems.

Preferred Qualifications: - Delivering post-incident remediation, reliability improvements, or corrective engineering work that addresses systemic failures and reduces recurrence. - Leading systems or data-engineering changes across large-scale distributed environments, including service integrations, data pipelines, access boundaries, or deployment workflows. - Partnering with security or privacy architects, incident responders, control owners, and validation teams to translate specialist requirements into engineering delivery; deep security specialization is not required. - Working across organizational or company boundaries where shared systems, ownership, and engineering capacity must be aligned. - Building repeatable remediation workflows, engineering dashboards, or automation that improves traceability, reduces manual coordination, and supports evidence-based closure.

Job Information 【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $204000 - $403200 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.

About USDS

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025.

Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation.

USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.

On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.

We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team.

We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless.

Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

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.

USDS Reasonable Accommodation

USDS 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 https://tinyurl.com/USDS-RA