Influence Operations Lead - Global Security Organization

Responsibilities

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and its offices include New York, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us
Creation is the core of TikTok's purpose. Our platform is built to help imaginations thrive. This is doubly true of the teams that make TikTok possible.
Together, we inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we all believe in and aim towards achieving every day.
To us, every challenge, no matter how difficult, is an opportunity; to learn, to innovate, and to grow as one team. Status quo? Never. Courage? Always.
At TikTok, we create together and grow together. That's how we drive impact - for ourselves, our company, and the communities we serve.
Join us.

The Global Security Organization provides industry-leading cybersecurity and business protection services to TikTok globally. Our organization employs four principles that guide our strategic and tactical operations. Firstly, we Champion Transparency & Trust by leading the charge in organizational transparency, prioritizing customer trust, and placing user needs first. Secondly, we aim to maintain Best in Class Global Security by proactively identifying and reducing risks while enabling innovative product development. We constantly work towards a sustainable world-class security capability. Thirdly, we strive to be a Business Catalyst & Enabler by embodying the DNA of technical innovation and ensuring our Global Security operations are fast and agile. Finally, we Drive Empowered & Risk-Informed Decision Making by providing our leaders with the necessary information to make agile decisions based on risk. In order to enhance collaboration and cross-functional partnerships, our organization follows a hybrid work schedule that requires employees to work in the office for 3 days a week, as directed by their manager. We regularly review our hybrid work model, and the specific requirements may change at any time.

We are seeking an experienced Influence Operations Lead to join the Threat Management Incident Response and Investigations Team within GSO. You will use your leadership skills and investigative and adversarial mindset to help us prevent, identify, detect, and mitigate influence operation (IO) networks and inauthentic engagement on TikTok. You will data mine threat actor abuse tactics, develop predictive models, conduct comprehensive proactive and reactive investigations using analytical skills, subject-matter expertise, and regional experience. You will author, disseminate and brief stakeholders on emerging trends, manage incidents, lead a team of IO analysts, and perform social network analysis at scale to discover, identify, and mitigate the most harmful threats targeting the platform. You will closely collaborate with engineers and behavioral scientists to resolve complex threats that reach across topic or feature areas and will require network analysis and the creation of detection pipelines. You will develop actionable recommendations, and continually iterate solutions to scale your impact.

Responsibilities
- Lead the synchronized assessment of threat actors' non-kinetic capabilities to wage IO, fuel propaganda and psychological operations, and disseminate disinformation to shape public opinion for sociopolitical and socioeconomic events and topics.
- Build and scale identification criteria for information operations, influence campaigns, and inauthentic engagement and operationally mature programs and processes.
- Research, assess, analyze, proactively detect and deter, report on, and mitigate IOs.
- Lead incident response for IO detected in the company's environment.
- Identify deceptive behavior of threat actors, collect and analyze signals through data analysis, and work analysts and engineers to improve detection models and develop data driven mitigation strategies.
- Author and disseminate information on emerging trends, patterns, and proactive mitigation efforts against IO threats.
- Prepare anticipatory deterrence and mitigation action plans for IOs across the company's suite of products.
- Use all available internal and external data sources to produce actionable intelligence on high-harm threat actors, their networks, and threat organizations in the topic area of Influence Operations.
- Apply structured analytic techniques, data science, and intelligence tradecraft to perform social network analysis of large attribute, ideational, and relational data sets to identify threat actor networks, critical nodes, and kill-chains.
- Collaborate with a team of global experts that respond to known threat actors and proactively build and tailor queries to discover and identify potential threats.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications
- Experience leading teams that research, analyze, report on, and mitigate threat actors fueling influence operations and engaging in inauthentic engagement on social media platforms.
- Experience building identification criteria, researching, analyzing, investigating and reporting on global IOs, cyber warfare, election interference, and inauthentic engagement on social media platforms.
- Experience conducting social network analysis for social media organizations, law enforcement, and/or intelligence community agencies.
- Experience with identifying, detecting, and correlating threat actors, networks, and organizations across global markets by performing quantitative and qualitative analysis of large data sets including attributing ideational, and relational data.
- Experience conducting Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
- Intermediate understanding of descriptive statistics.
- Proficient in SQL or other relational database language and beginner in another object oriented programming language.
- Ability to prioritize competing tasks, recognize when and which incidents to escalate, and experience briefing stakeholders at all levels of the company.

Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree or higher in Intelligence Operations, Information Operations, Intelligence, Computer Science, Data Science, other relevant fields equivalent work experience.
- 5 years of people management experience.
- Rapidly shift priorities based on evolving challenges to the platform.
- Identify anomalous behavior and determine ways for further exploring new research leads
- Communicate coherently and crisply to incident response teams and senior leadership
- Communicate complex concepts to broader stakeholders without shared expertise
- Critical thinking skills with the ability to apply theorems or analytical techniques to discover insights that are not readily apparent

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.

TikTok 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://shorturl.at/cdpT2