Backend Software Engineer - PDPO - Offense & Defense - PDPO

The Privacy and Data Protection Office (PDPO) leads and supports TikTok's global privacy efforts, making sure privacy is protected across our products, platforms, and technologies. As a technical privacy center of excellence, we partner closely with engineering, product, legal, and compliance teams to identify privacy risks and design effective technical safeguards throughout the software development lifecycle.

At TikTok's scale, protecting user data means going beyond compliance to find complex privacy vulnerabilities and emerging risks across highly distributed products and systems. We combine privacy engineering, security engineering, penetration testing, red teaming, and secure code review to surface those risks, develop mitigations, and build scalable automated assessment capabilities that protect privacy without slowing product innovation.

You will work at the intersection of privacy, security, and engineering, on real-world privacy challenges at global scale, influencing how privacy is built into products from the ground up.

The Privacy and Data Protection Office (PDPO) leads, supervises, and empowers all of TikTok's privacy work in an accountable and industry-leading way. The team is the in-house expert on the privacy risk landscape and partners across the company to implement the safeguards and technical mitigations that ensure users' privacy is honoured across TikTok's products and platforms. The Offense and Defense team establishes capability to proactively identify, monitor, and mitigate privacy risks across target domains; build a scalable monitoring system as the second line of defense; translate risk objectives into detection capabilities to enhance visibility across key privacy risk areas; and strengthen the technical and data foundation to support reliable monitoring, investigation, and risk-informed decision-making across the organization.

• Design, construct, test, and maintain robust, fault-tolerant, and scalable data pipelines and data services to support high-throughput analytical workloads.
• Build, optimize, and expand storage solutions, data models, and enterprise data warehouses using modern distributed databases and caching technologies.
• Investigate and integrate up-and-coming big data tools, open-source frameworks, and modern technologies into existing production environments.
• Implement fault-tolerant mechanisms, triage and debug complex data infrastructure issues, and establish operational monitoring to protect system reliability and SLA.
• Partner with data scientists, analysts, product managers, and software engineering teams to align data platform capabilities with core business goals and deliver seamless integrations with third-party data systems.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualification(s) Must have 1 year of experience in each of the following:

• Designing and modeling data warehouses to power business intelligence, analytics, reporting, and data applications.
• Implementing production ETL workflows and data processing using Hive, Spark, Hadoop, and/or SQL Server to optimize execution performance and query latency.
• Developing production code using SQL, Python, and/or Java.
• Troubleshooting, triaging, and debugging complex distributed data infrastructure and pipeline failures.
• Building scalable data services or serving layers utilizing HBase, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, and/or SQL Server.

Preferred Qualification(s)

• Strong analytical thinking with a track record of thriving in fast-paced, rapidly evolving environments and taking ownership of ambiguous technical problems.
• Excellent communication and cross-team execution skills in a fast-paced environment.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $162000 - $387600 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:

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

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

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

1. Exercising sound judgment.