Tech Lead Manager, Data Platform

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Parental leave

Short-term and long-term disability

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Holiday, sick days and paid personal/s

Paid Personal Time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture is seeking a Tech Lead Manager for the Data Platform team to guide data engineers and software engineers in delivering scalable data assets on time. You will own end-to-end reliability, collaborate with Product, Analytics, and Data Science partners, and drive integration of AI-powered self-healing and governance across data pipelines.

You will work with the Data Foundation team to shape platform capabilities, improve throughput and cost efficiency, and ensure governance

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 ownership, operational excellence, engineering rigor, and a builder's mindset toward automation and AI.
• Own operational delivery for your business line: End-to-end accountability for reliability, timeliness, and quality of pipelines, jobs, and data assets; 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, self-healing pipelines, LLM-powered data development and code review, automated data quality and governance checks, and cost optimization.
• Partner with the business: Be the primary engineering point of contact for Product, Analytics, Data Science, and Engineering; translate priorities into a concrete data delivery and reliability roadmap.
• Collaborate with the Data Foundation team: Co-shape data platform requirements, adopt new capabilities, bring foundation capabilities to business, and reflect business realities.
• Uphold governance and compliance: Ensure pipelines, datasets, and tooling meet data governance, privacy, security, and regulatory requirements in the US data environment.

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

Tools

Spark

Flink

Hadoop

Kafka

Druid

ClickHouse

Job description

Responsibilities

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 need of all the major TikTok businesses lines - including TikTok, Live, eCommerce, while maintaining efficient resource utilization, workload isolation, and regulatory compliance.

About the Role

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: our happy clients count on your service to produce data that are critical for business intelligence, application operations, and customer successes across multiple data centers.

You will innovate with software, automation, and AI to do more with what we have — driving 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 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.

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 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 $208800 - $438000 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;
3. Exercising sound judgment.