Applied AI Engineer, Forensics - Global Security Organization

Responsibilities
The mission of TikTok's Global Security Organization is to build and earn trust by reducing risk and securing our businesses and products. Also known as "GSO", this team is the foundation of our efforts to keep TikTok safe, secure, and operating at scale for over 1 billion people around the world. We work to ensure that the TikTok platform is safe and secure, that our users' experience and their data remains safe from external or internal threats, and that we comply with global regulations wherever TikTok operates.

Trust is one of TikTok's biggest initiatives, and security is integral to our success. In whatever ways users interact with us — whether they're watching videos on their For You page, interacting with a Live video, or buying products on TikTok Shop — GSO protects their data and privacy, so they can have a secure and trustworthy experience.

TikTok’s Global Forensics team is responsible for the company’s technical investigations and digital forensics work.
This role sits at the intersection of applied AI, software engineering, security data engineering, and digital forensics. You will build evidence-aware AI systems that help investigators retrieve, correlate, reason over, package, and explain evidence across complex enterprise telemetry, while preserving auditability, reproducibility, privacy, and human judgment.

You will also partner closely with investigators to convert recurring case patterns into reusable workflows, AI-assisted investigation tools, evaluation datasets, playbooks, and detection/control improvements.

Responsibilities:
- Design and build AI-native forensic investigation workflows for evidence retrieval, enrichment, entity normalization, timeline reconstruction, evidence indexing, evidence packaging, and investigation report generation.
- Build agentic systems that safely interact with internal tools, APIs, logs, and investigation datasets through controlled tool use, permissioning, human-in-the-loop review, and auditable execution traces.
- Develop retrieval, knowledge, and reasoning systems over cases, logs, policies, tickets, reports, and evidence repositories, with grounded citations and structured outputs.
- Create evaluation frameworks for forensic AI workflows, including golden cases, regression tests, grounding checks, hallucination/failure analysis, precision/recall measurement, and investigator feedback loops.
- Engineer data workflows across platform audit logs, identity/cloud logs, endpoint/server telemetry, network logs, DLP, and other investigation data sources.
- Partner with forensic investigators to turn ambiguous investigative questions into reproducible workflows, reusable query packs, dashboards, agent tools, and defensible technical outputs.
- Drive proactive risk discovery by generalizing patterns from real cases, running targeted hunts across multi-source telemetry, validating signals, and converting findings into detection, logging, control, and process improvements.
- Apply AI-assisted engineering responsibly to accelerate prototyping, refactoring, testing, and documentation while maintaining code review, test coverage, change control, privacy safeguards, and evidentiary defensibility.

Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- Strong hands-on software engineering ability in Python, plus experience with Go, TypeScript, Java, or another production language.
- Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications, agentic workflows, RAG/retrieval systems, tool/function calling, structured generation, or evaluation frameworks.
- Experience querying, processing, and correlating large-scale security, operational, or enterprise telemetry across multiple data sources.
- Ability to design reliable, testable, observable, and auditable systems for high-stakes investigation workflows.
- Working knowledge of digital forensics, technical investigations, incident response, threat hunting, insider risk, data misuse investigations, or enterprise security operations.

Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience building investigation platforms, forensic tooling, analyst workbenches, detection engineering platforms, security data products, or investigation workflow systems.
- Experience with LangGraph, LlamaIndex, LangChain, MCP, vector databases, hybrid search, reranking, knowledge graphs, or custom agent orchestration.
- Familiarity with AI security risks such as prompt injection, tool misuse, data leakage, unsafe autonomous actions, model/output provenance, and agent sandboxing.
- Experience with cross-domain investigations combining DLP, identity/cloud, endpoint/EDR/HIDS, network telemetry, internal platform audit logs, and business context.

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.​
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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.​