Head of Validation - Security & Privacy

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC seeks a Head of Validation to lead Vulnerability Management, Validation Engineering, Cyber & Privacy Validation, and Generative AI & Content Assurance Validation. The role directs end-to-end testing, threat-informed defense, and independent validation across global teams, reporting to senior leadership.

You will drive strategy, governance, and metrics to demonstrate security posture and risk reduction while collaborating with product, privacy, and legal teams.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in information security with leadership of multi-team groups.
• Experience building or scaling offensive security or validation functions.
• Ability to translate technical findings into risk statements for executives.
• Experience across cloud, infrastructure, applications, identity, and data.
• Strong track record working with cross-functional teams while staying independent.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a global Validation organization that provides objective evidence on controls in practice.
• Own full discovery to remediation cycle, including red teaming, testing, and measurement.
• Set strategy for offensive testing and balance broad exercises with focused tests by risk.
• Run Vulnerability Management at enterprise scale with emphasis on exploitable fixes.
• Verify fixes post-incident and ensure systems return to expected state.
• Measure security posture and communicate trends to executives and GRC stakeholders.
• Challenge controls across cyber defense, data protection, IAM, and privacy.
• Independently test generative AI, content assurance controls, and jailbreak tests.

Skills

Information security

Leadership

Offensive security

Executive communication

Threat modeling

Tools

MITRE ATT&CK

NIST CSF/800-53

ISO 27001

OWASP LLM Top 10

Job description

Responsibilities

About the Team

The Validation organization independently tests whether our security and privacy controls work and meet our extreamly high security and compliance standards. Security & Privacy (S&P) sets the standards and builds the solutions. Validation checks that they hold up against real attackers, at scale, and keep working over time.

Validation owns the whole cycle from finding issues to fixing them: discovering weaknesses through red teaming, penetration testing and attack simulation across our social, games, education, productivity, and generative AI applications and models; deciding which ones matter based on how they could actually be exploited; driving fixes to completion across the company; confirming that fixes hold; and measuring how well our controls work overall. This covers product security, cyber defense, data protection, identity and access management (IAM), incident response, cloud and corporate infrastructure, privacy, and generative AI and content.

About the Role

The Head of Validation leads the following teams: Vulnerability Management, Validation Engineeringm Cyber & Privacy Validation (Penetration Testing and Red Team) and Generative AI & Content Assurance Validation.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a global Validation organization that gives leadership independent, objective evidence on whether the controls and software we approved work in practice.
• Own the full cycle from finding issues to fixing them: discovery (red teaming, penetration testing, attack simulation, adversarial AI testing, privacy testing), prioritization, remediation, verification after fixes, and measurement.
• Set the strategy and rules of engagement for offensive testing. Balance broad, whole-company red team exercises with focused tests of single systems or targets, based on risk, threat intelligence, and business priorities.
• Run Vulnerability Management at scale. Prioritize based on how issues could actually be exploited, hold owners accountable for fixes, and push for fixes that remove whole classes of attack rather than single issues. Use automation to recommend fixes and close gaps faster.
• Make sure fixes hold. After any fix or incident, confirm from both inside and outside the network that the control works and that systems are back to their expected state.
• Through Validation Engineering, measure how well our security tools and processes work and how much they cover. Turn the results into an ongoing view of security posture that executives can track, with clear metrics, trends, and gap analysis.
• Independently challenge cyber defense, data protection, IAM, and privacy controls against realistic threats and declared requirements, including detection, prevention, containment, data handling, retention, and deletion.
• Independently test generative AI, recommendation, and content assurance controls, including jailbreaks, data leakage, model safety, ranking behavior, content provenance, and drift, working alongside first-line content assurance owners.
• Keep validation independent from the teams that own controls. Control owners design, run, monitor, and fix their controls; Validation tests them. Build close working relationships while preserving objectivity.
• Report validation results, residual risk, and posture trends to the CSO, senior leadership, and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), audit, and regulatory stakeholders where needed.
• Hire, develop, and keep strong leaders and engineers. Build a high-performing, inclusive culture across regions and time zones.
• Define team charters, operating model, roadmap, headcount, and budget. Grow the validation scope as the program matures.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• 15+ years in information security, including 8+ years leading multi-team organizations in offensive security, red teaming, penetration testing, vulnerability management, or security assurance.
• Proven record of building or scaling an offensive security or validation function at a large, complex technology company.
• Deep understanding of attacker tradecraft across cloud, corporate infrastructure, applications, identity, and data, and of how to translate it into meaningful control testing.
• Experience running vulnerability management at enterprise scale, including exploitability-based prioritization, accountability for fixes, and success metrics.
• Strong executive presence. Able to turn technical findings into clear, objective risk statements for senior leadership.
• Experience working across security engineering, product, infrastructure, privacy, and legal teams while staying independent.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience validating privacy controls (data handling, retention, deletion, access) against regulatory or contractual requirements.
• Experience with adversarial testing of AI/ML systems, such as large language model (LLM) jailbreaks, prompt injection, data leakage, or recommender and content-integrity testing.
• Background building security control validation or breach-and-attack simulation programs and posture measurement platforms.
• Familiarity with frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK, NIST CSF/800-53, ISO 27001, OWASP (including the LLM Top 10), and threat-informed defense practices.
• Experience in highly regulated or heavily scrutinized environments, including independent oversight, audit, or government-facing assurance work. Experience leading globally distributed teams.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., OSCP/OSCE, GXPN, CISSP) or a track record of public security research.

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