Senior Security Incident Response Commander

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 374,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Disability and life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Holidays, sick days, and personal time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Senior Enterprise Incident Manager to lead the response to high-severity incidents impacting continuity, trust, and regulatory commitments. You will coordinate cross-functional teams, communicate with executives, and drive post-incident improvements from a position of influence and deep technical experience.

The role requires hands-on investigation, rapid decision-making, and a proven ability to balance technical and business priorities across Security,

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Significant experience in the technology industry, with production operations, enterprise platforms, infrastructure, cybersecurity, or large-scale service environments.
• Strong hands-on technical experience investigating and coordinating high-stakes incidents.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end command and coordination for high-severity enterprise incidents.
• Serve as the central incident leader during complex events with clear response structure.
• Work hands-on with technical teams to investigate incidents, review logs, and support containment and recovery actions.
• Coordinate response activities across multiple teams including Security, Engineering, and Legal.
• Deliver executive communications during incidents and post-incident briefings.
• Prepare incident reporting for executive leadership and government stakeholders when required.
• Facilitate incident reviews and postmortems with documented root causes and remediation plans.
• Identify trends across incidents to improve resilience and escalation maturity.
• Refine tooling, workflows, and metrics to speed incident response.

Skills

Incident management

Leadership

Executive communication

Cross-functional collaboration

Analytical skills

Decision making under pressure

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Job description

Responsibilities

About the Role

The Senior Enterprise Incident Manager is responsible for leading the response to high-severity enterprise and operational incidents that may affect business continuity, customer trust, regulatory obligations, or executive priorities. This role combines strong incident command, technical depth, and executive communication. The ideal candidate brings substantial experience in the technology industry, a proven record of hands-on technical investigation and response, and the judgment to coordinate cross-functional teams during fast-moving, high-stakes events.

This position partners closely with Security, Engineering, Infrastructure, Product, Legal, Compliance, Public Policy, Communications, and executive stakeholders to drive effective incident response, clear decision-making, and continuous improvement.

Responsibilities

• - Lead end-to-end command and coordination for high-severity enterprise incidents, including triage, escalation, stakeholder alignment, mitigation tracking, and resolution management.
• - Serve as the central incident leader during complex or high-stakes events, ensuring the right technical and business teams are engaged quickly and operating against a clear response structure.
• - Work hands-on with technical teams to investigate active incidents, analyze system behavior, review logs, validate hypotheses, identify dependencies, and support effective containment and recovery actions.
• - Coordinate response activities across Engineering, Site Reliability, Security, Infrastructure, Product, Support, Legal, Compliance, Communications, and leadership teams.
• - Drive high-quality executive communications during incidents, including concise status updates, decision memos, risk summaries, and post-incident briefings.
• - Prepare and deliver incident reporting for executive leadership, board-level audiences, and government stakeholders when required, ensuring accuracy, clarity, and alignment with legal and regulatory expectations.
• - Contribute to and adhere to incident playbooks, severity frameworks, escalation paths, communications standards, and operational playbooks.
• - Facilitate incident reviews and postmortems, ensuring root causes, contributing factors, lessons learned, and remediation plans are clearly documented and tracked to completion.
• - Identify trends across incidents and near misses to improve resilience, readiness, observability, escalation quality, and cross-functional response maturity.
• - Improve the quality and speed of incident response by refining tooling, workflows, and metrics that support detection, coordination, reporting, and leadership visibility.
• - Act as a trusted advisor during sensitive events where technical, business, regulatory, and reputational considerations must be balanced in real time.

Qualifications

Minium Qualifications

• - Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• - Significant experience in the technology industry, with direct exposure to production operations, enterprise platforms, infrastructure, cybersecurity, or large-scale service environments. Demonstrated experience leading or coordinating major incident response in complex technical organizations.
• - Strong hands-on technical experience investigating, responding to, and coordinating high-stakes incidents, including the ability to work effectively with engineers and technical operators. Experience analyzing incident data such as system events, operational signals, service dependencies, logs, timelines, and recovery actions to support response leadership and decision-making.
• - Proven experience communicating incident status, business impact, and remediation plans to executive leadership, including senior operational or corporate stakeholders.Experience preparing or presenting incident-related updates, risk summaries, or formal reporting to boards and government stakeholders.
• - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical developments into clear business language for a range of audiences.
• - Strong judgment, composure, and decision-making ability in ambiguous and time-sensitive situations.Experience building cross-functional trust and influencing technical and non-technical stakeholders without direct authority.
• - Strong team management and operational discipline, including the ability to drive action items, owners, deadlines, and follow-through after incidents.

Preferred Qualifications

• - Working knowledge of modern infrastructure, distributed systems, cloud environments, identity systems, networking, and security response concepts in enterprise incident management, cyber incident response, site reliability, production operations, or related technical risk functions.
• - Familiarity with regulated or highly scrutinized operating environments where reporting quality, traceability, and stakeholder management are critical.
• - Experience supporting crisis management programs, business continuity, or executive response frameworks.Track record of designing or improving incident management processes, operating models, governance structures, and executive briefing mechanisms.

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 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. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

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.

USDS Reasonable Accommodation

USDS 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://tinyurl.com/USDS-RA

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $199800 - $374400 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 may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 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.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. Exercising sound judgment.