Data Platform Engineering Lead — AI-Driven Reliability

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 209,000 - 438,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Data Platform team to lead data engineers and software engineers, delivering large-scale data assets on time across multiple data centers.

You will drive automation, AI-assisted reliability, and governance, partner with Product, Analytics, Data Science, and Data Foundation, and ensure compliance and on-call responsiveness in a fully in-person US environment.

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.

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 the 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, and bring 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.

Skills

Communication skills

Stakeholder management

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering or related field

Tools

Spark

Flink

Hadoop

Kafka

Druid

ClickHouse

Job description

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Data Platform team to lead data engineers and software engineers, delivering large-scale data assets on time across multiple data centers.

You will drive automation, AI-assisted reliability, and governance, partner with Product, Analytics, Data Science, and Data Foundation, and ensure compliance and on-call responsiveness in a fully in-person US environment.