Senior Technical Program Manager, Security & Privacy

About the team

The Security & Privacy Programs team helps TikTok USDS Joint Venture turn cross-functional security and privacy requirements into coordinated execution. We work with incident management, security architects, and engineering and functional teams across departments to resolve complex issues that span systems, products, and organizational boundaries.

Our remediation work addresses the gap between containing an incident and implementing the lasting engineering changes needed to prevent it from recurring. We bring technical program leadership to that work: aligning teams on the problem, shaping actionable remediation plans, resolving dependencies, and ensuring that implemented solutions are tested and supported by clear evidence.

Responsibilities

• Engage deeply in engineering problems: Work directly with engineers to understand system architectures, API contracts, data flows, service dependencies, and operational constraints. Review technical proposals, question assumptions, and assess implementation complexity, integration effort, and failure modes. Use that understanding to help teams solve problems rather than simply track delivery dates.
• Translate ambiguity into executable technical programs: Turn complex requirements and remediation needs into clearly scoped engineering workstreams with agreed interfaces, ownership boundaries, acceptance criteria, and resource plans. Partner with technical leads to sequence design, development, integration, testing, and rollout, making uncertainty and the work needed to resolve it explicit.
• Align stakeholders through technical credibility: Build shared goals across engineering, architecture, business, and security partners within the cross-functional departments. Use delivery data, sound technical reasoning, and a clear connection to business outcomes to secure decisions and commitments without relying on reporting lines or formal authority.
• Manage the critical path and make balanced trade-offs: Map cross-team dependencies, identify bottlenecks and schedule uncertainty, and keep the critical path current as technical findings and priorities change. When delays are unavoidable, compare options such as phased delivery, resequencing, reduced scope, or additional capacity against risk, quality, and business impact. Align stakeholders on the revised plan and escalate residual risks to accountable decision-makers.
• Resolve technical disagreements objectively: Guide teams through conflicts over API definitions, architectural boundaries, implementation approaches, and ownership. Separate assumptions from evidence, establish shared decision criteria, and use design reviews, targeted experiments, or performance and reliability data to evaluate alternatives. Build consensus around the strongest technical and business rationale, document decisions, and escalate unresolved trade-offs with clear recommendations.
• Drive implementation through validated outcomes: Stay engaged as engineering teams build, integrate, and deploy solutions, helping resolve technical blockers and ensuring cross-system testing and operational readiness. For remediation programs, partner with architects and validation teams to demonstrate that changes address the underlying failure modes and reduce recurrence. Provide the resulting evidence and outstanding risks to EIM for its formal closure decision.
• Improve engineering delivery practices: Use measures such as dependency wait time, integration failures, rework, and delivery predictability to identify systemic obstacles rather than merely report status. Improve planning and decision-making practices, communicate actionable risks and options to leadership, and share reusable methods and mentoring that help teams deliver complex programs more effectively.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• A strong engineering foundation gained through hands-on software, systems, infrastructure, or data engineering work, with the ability to make substantive technical contributions to solution and delivery discussions.
• Demonstrated experience independently leading complex, multi-team technical programs or a portfolio of interdependent engineering initiatives, from ambiguous requirements and planning through implementation, testing, and delivery.
• Ability to understand complex system architectures, service dependencies, APIs, and data flows; assess technical trade-offs; and connect proposed changes to root causes and intended outcomes.
• Strong program-management judgment across prioritization, resource planning, dependency management, risk resolution, and change management, including securing commitments from teams with competing priorities.
• Experience defining measurable acceptance criteria and coordinating technical validation, with a disciplined approach to documenting decisions, evaluating evidence, and resolving incomplete or ineffective fixes.
• Ability to influence engineers, architects, and senior stakeholders without direct reporting authority, communicate clearly across technical and nontechnical audiences, and remain accountable for resolving difficult cross-functional problems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Delivering post-incident remediation, reliability improvements, or corrective engineering work that addresses systemic failures and reduces recurrence.
• Leading systems or data-engineering changes across large-scale distributed environments, including service integrations, data pipelines, access boundaries, or deployment workflows.
• Partnering with security or privacy architects, incident responders, control owners, and validation teams to translate specialist requirements into engineering delivery; deep security specialization is not required.
• Working across organizational or company boundaries where shared systems, ownership, and engineering capacity must be aligned.
• Building repeatable remediation workflows, engineering dashboards, or automation that improves traceability, reduces manual coordination, and supports evidence-based closure.