What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Data Scientist - E-Commerce Anti-Fraud position at TikTok USDS Joint Venture?
Responsibilities
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:
- 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. Drive the end-to-end development, deployment, and continuous monitoring of real-time machine learning models for risk scoring and fraud detection.
- Leverage graph analytics, clustering, and entity-resolution techniques to uncover coordinated fraud rings and collusive attacks.
- Design and evaluate rigorous A/B experiments to measure the trade-offs between security, financial loss, and legitimate user friction.
- Leverage modern AI tools and LLMs to automate risk workflows, optimize analytics, and streamline detection capabilities.
- Partner on robust data pipeline infrastructure (including USDS operations) to ensure strict adherence to cross-border data privacy and compliance standards.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in mathematics, statistics, computer science, data analytics, or engineering
- Proficient in SQL and Python/R
- 3 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
Preferred Qualifications:
- Familiarity with AI-enabled workflows and hands-on experience building or implementing AI-powered tools, automations, or solutions.
- 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
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and show good judgement
About USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.
On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.
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.
USDS Reasonable Accommodation
USDS 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/USDS-RA
Job Information
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $190950 - $375516 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 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:
- 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. Drive the end-to-end development, deployment, and continuous monitoring of real-time machine learning models for risk scoring and fraud detection.
- Leverage graph analytics, clustering, and entity-resolution techniques to uncover coordinated fraud rings and collusive attacks.
- Design and evaluate rigorous A/B experiments to measure the trade-offs between security, financial loss, and legitimate user friction.
- Leverage modern AI tools and LLMs to automate risk workflows, optimize analytics, and streamline detection capabilities.
- Partner on robust data pipeline infrastructure (including USDS operations) to ensure strict adherence to cross-border data privacy and compliance standards.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in mathematics, statistics, computer science, data analytics, or engineering
- Proficient in SQL and Python/R
- 3 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
Preferred Qualifications:
- Familiarity with AI-enabled workflows and hands-on experience building or implementing AI-powered tools, automations, or solutions.
- 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
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and show good judgement
About USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.
On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.
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.
USDS Reasonable Accommodation
USDS 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/USDS-RA
Job Information
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $190950 - $375516 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.
Salary : $190,950 - $375,516