Data Scientist Tech Lead- E-Commerce Anti-Fraud

About the Team

E-commerce's Governance and Experience is a global team responsible for ensuring our TikTok Shop marketplace is safe and trustworthy for users, sellers, and creators. We value user satisfaction and work on policies, rules, and systems to ensure quality.

The USDS Risk Control and Security team within GNE focuses on fighting various forms of fraud and abuse within the TikTok Shop ecosystem via insight generation, scaled enforcement, automation, and prevention.

About the Role

The Risk Control & Security Anti-Fraud Data Scientist role focuses on mitigating fraud, abuse, policy violations and business risks for TikTok's e-commerce platform, TikTok Shop. This role is critical in protecting our buyer, merchant, and creator communities, ensuring compliance with internal policies and industry regulations while balancing customer experience and business growth.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor junior data scientists
• Initiate and coordinate team-wide initiatives to improve efficiency and advance the team's skills
• Represent and advocate for the team when collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Leverage modern AI tools and LLMs to automate risk workflows, optimize analytics, and streamline detection capabilities.
• Conduct complex, exploratory data analysis to uncover emerging fraud vectors, behavioral anomalies, and latent platform vulnerabilities.
• Define risk metrics, construct self-serve dashboards, and build real-time automated alerting/circuit breakers for rapid threat response and executive visibility.
• Formulate, validate, configure, and deploy risk strategies and rules to mitigate fraud with minimal false positives.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in mathematics, statistics, computer science, data analytics, engineering, or related field
• Proficient in SQL and Python/R
• 5+ years of relevant experience in one of the following areas: Anti-fraud, Risk Management, Trust & Safety, Data Analytics, or Data Science in e-commerce or the general tech industry
• Familiarity with AI-enabled workflows and hands-on experience building or implementing AI-powered tools, automations, or solutions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to work independently with global teams
• Proactive, data-driven, results-oriented, and a high desire to learn and contribute
• Strong leadership and mentoring skills
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and show good judgement