Tech Lead Manager, Data Platform

About the Role

The Data Platform team at the TikTok USDS Joint Venture operates TikTok's US data processing ecosystem: a full suite of big data services, hundreds of thousands of batch and streaming pipelines/tasks, resource optimization, compliance, and guaranteed data production. We ensure pipelines produce high-quality production data reliably and on time to meet the needs of all major TikTok business lines—including TikTok, Live, and eCommerce—while maintaining efficient resource utilization, workload isolation, and regulatory compliance.

As a Tech Lead Manager on the Data Platform team, you will lead a team of data engineers and software engineers, create innovative solutions to scale operations, and own the reliable on-time delivery of large-scale data assets. Your team is the business's dependable delivery partner: clients rely on your service to produce data critical for business intelligence, application operations, and customer success across multiple data centers. You will innovate with software, automation, and AI to drive self-healing pipelines, AI-assisted reliability engineering and on-call, intelligent cost and resource optimization, and automation for data development, quality checks, and governance.

You will collaborate closely with the internal Data Foundation team, surfacing operational needs, co-defining roadmaps, and jointly turning platform capabilities into measurable reliability, efficiency, and productivity gains for your business line.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the team: Manage, coach, and develop a team of data engineers. Foster a culture of ownership, operational excellence, engineering rigor, and a builder's mindset toward automation and AI.
• Own operational delivery for your business line: Take end-to-end accountability for the reliability, timeliness, and quality of batch and streaming pipelines, jobs, and data assets serving business needs. Own SLAs, on-call health, incident response, and postmortem-driven improvement.
• Innovate with software, automation, and AI: Build or adopt tooling for AI-assisted SRE (triage, root-cause analysis, auto-remediation), self-healing and auto-tuning pipelines, LLM-powered data development and code review, automated data quality and lineage checks, and intelligent cost optimization. Turn repeated toil into products.
• Partner with the business: Act as the primary engineering point of contact for your business line's Product, Analytics, Data Science, and Engineering partners. Translate business priorities into a concrete data delivery and reliability roadmap; communicate trade-offs, risks, and dependencies clearly.
• Collaborate with the Data Foundation team: Co-shape data platform requirements, adopt new platform capabilities, and bring foundation capabilities to your business while reflecting your business's realities to the foundation.
• Uphold governance and compliance: Ensure all pipelines, datasets, and tooling under your team meet data governance, privacy, security, and regulatory requirements applicable to the US data environment.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience building and operating enterprise-grade data platforms or large-scale distributed data systems, including 3+ years in an engineering leadership or engineering management role overseeing technical teams in a cross-functional, fast-paced environment.
• Hands-on experience operating production batch and streaming systems built on technologies such as Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Kafka, Druid, ClickHouse, or equivalents—including on-call ownership, SLA management, and incident response. Must have a builder mindset.
• Strong grasp of modern data architectures (data lakes, data warehouses, lakehouse patterns) and of what makes large-scale pipelines reliable, efficient, and observable.
• Demonstrated ability to improve throughput, reliability, or cost efficiency of a data system without linear headcount growth—through automation, tooling, or architectural change.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and cross-functional partnership skills.
• Ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on problem-solving.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience applying AI/LLM technologies to data operations—for example, AI-assisted SRE and observability, LLM-powered data development or code review, automated governance and cataloging, or intelligent cost optimization.
• Track record leading a business-embedded data engineering team that partners with Product, Analytics, and Data Science on a specific business line (e.g., e-commerce, live streaming, consumer social).
• Familiarity with data compliance and privacy requirements in a regulated environment (e.g., US data sovereignty, PII handling).

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 toward 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 in the selected city is $198,360 - $416,100 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies, and experience. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work; 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).

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

Schedule

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