SRE Tech Lead Manager, Product - USDS

About the role

The USDS TikTok Product Engineering SRE team works with engineering and product teams to build, maintain, and run large-scale, globally distributed, observable, fault-tolerant systems. SREs on this team will deliver on production ownership and be responsible for observability and automation across complex, large-scale service mesh architectures.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to a team of Site Reliability Engineers focused on building observable, fault-tolerant systems
• Drive architectural decisions for large-scale, globally distributed service mesh architectures
• Establish and maintain production ownership models, incident response protocols, and service level objectives
• Develop strategic roadmaps for observability and automation initiatives that enhance system reliability
• Balance technical contributions with people management responsibilities, including career development, performance evaluations, and team growth
• Foster a culture of reliability, continuous improvement, and knowledge sharing within your team and across the organization
• Lead security initiatives to safeguard critical assets, partnering with security and compliance teams to implement robust protocols that ensure data protection and regulatory compliance across all services

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience and expertise in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems, relational databases, caching solutions, and web service frameworks
• Previous experience leading a small to mid-size team while maintaining significant "hands-on" technical contributions
• Strong understanding of Unix/Linux operating systems internals and networking fundamentals
• Proficiency in writing production-grade code in Go, Python, Java, or similar languages
• Proven track record of establishing and implementing SRE best practices across engineering organizations
• Experience developing and maintaining service level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep expertise in algorithms, data structures, and systems design with proven ability to architect complex technical solutions
• Track record of developing sophisticated automation tools and developer-friendly APIs that streamline operations and eliminate toil
• Extensive experience running high-availability web services at massive scale, with comprehensive knowledge of cloud-native architectures and advanced networking concepts

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 an 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.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $208,800 - $438,000 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

• Day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) savings plan with company match
• Paid parental leave
• Short-term and long-term disability coverage
• Life insurance
• Wellbeing benefits
• 10 paid holidays per year
• 10 paid sick days per year
• 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure)

Schedule

Fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.