Responsibilities
TikTok's AI Governance team is chartered with ensuring responsible development and deployment of AI across the platform — from large-scale training pipelines through production inference. As foundation models and generative AI move deeper into product surfaces, the team owns the controls, policy enforcement, and technical safeguards that keep user data protected and model behavior aligned with regulatory and ethical commitments. This role, Software Architect – AI Governance, will design and implement scalable, reliable, and high-performance systems that govern how data and models are trained, evaluated, released, and served at TikTok scale. The architect will translate fast-evolving privacy, safety, and regulatory requirements into concrete platform capabilities, and will partner closely with ML platform, research, product, privacy, and security teams to land solutions that work at the scale of TikTok's training and serving infrastructure. - Design and implement scalable, reliable, high-performance systems for data and model governance across the full ML lifecycle — data ingestion, training, evaluation, deployment, and online inference. - Architect controls for large-scale model training and deployment: training-data lineage and provenance, dataset approval and taxonomy, model registries, evaluation gates, and safe-release workflows for foundation and generative AI models. - Develop innovative solutions to tackle emerging risks in Generative AI — including prompt-injection defense, data leakage and memorization mitigation, output safety filtering, agentic-system guardrails, watermarking, and provenance signals. - Partner with ML platform and research teams to embed governance hooks (policy checks, PII/PNS filtering, red-team evaluations) directly into training and serving paths without regressing model quality or throughput. - Collaborate with privacy, security, and legal to ensure systems comply with applicable regulations (GDPR, CCPA, EU AI Act, sector-specific rules) and with TikTok's own commitments on responsible AI. - Drive the technical roadmap for AI governance platform capabilities; identify and evaluate new techniques, tools, and research that strengthen the governance posture at scale. - Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers across the organization on AI governance, data governance, and generative-AI risk topics.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualification(s) - Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field. - Strong background in large-scale distributed systems, databases, messaging and streaming systems, and caching. - Hands-on experience with the ML lifecycle at production scale — training pipelines, feature/data stores, model registries, or online serving systems. - Expertise in data and/or model governance for large-scale model training and deployment: lineage, access control, evaluation, release gating, monitoring. - Track record of developing innovative technical solutions for emerging risks in Generative AI models (e.g., prompt injection, data leakage / memorization, output safety, alignment evaluation, agentic-system safety). - Experience with microservices architecture and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP, and Agile development and DevOps practices. - Strong communication and collaboration skills; ability to work independently across multiple priorities. Preferred Qualification(s) - 5+ years of industry experience in a software development environment, with significant time spent on ML platform, AI safety, or data/AI governance. - Familiarity with privacy-enhancing technologies (differential privacy, federated learning, secure enclaves, PII detection / de-identification). - Familiarity with applicable regulations (GDPR, CCPA, EU AI Act) and industry standards (NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001). - Experience with foundation-model training, RLHF, evaluation harnesses, or red-teaming frameworks. - Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in AI governance, AI safety, or responsible AI.
Job Information
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $254400 - $480000 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;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.
About TikTok
TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.
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.
TikTok Accommodation
TikTok 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/RA-request
