Senior Product Manager, AI Safety Evaluation & Governance - TikTok Safety Product

The Feed Safety-Model & Data Intelligence team within TikTok Platform Responsibility ensures that AI models meet the highest bar before they make content safety decisions affecting billions of users. Our work spans three layers:
- Standards & Governance — We define and iterate the safety standards that AI systems must follow, translating complex policy intent into structured, machine-interpretable frameworks. This requires deep governance thinking: navigating trade-offs between safety, fairness, user experience, and enforcement consistency.
- AI/ML Solution Design — We partner closely with algorithm teams to improve model accuracy and stability across safety scenarios, tackling challenges unique to this domain — adversarial content, imbalanced distributions, and deep contextual understanding. We evaluate, select, and help shape the right AI approaches (LLMs, prompting strategies, agentic workflows, etc.) for each problem.
- Rigorous Evaluation — We design statistically grounded evaluation frameworks, build high-quality ground truth datasets, and ensure our assessments are valid, reproducible, and actionable — so the platform can confidently ship AI-powered safety systems at scale.
Our work sits at the intersection of AI/ML product development, trust & safety policy, and data-driven quality assurance — ensuring that AI systems can be reliably deployed for high-precision content review and risk governance at scale.
Responsibilities
- Define and own the evaluation methodology for AI-powered safety models — establish frameworks for measuring continuous recall capability across risk severity tiers; define launch criteria, regression thresholds, and ongoing monitoring requirements so that no model ships or degrades without clear, evidence-based quality signals.
- Design and build diverse positive-example evaluation datasets — develop principled labeling taxonomies and sampling strategies that maximize coverage of real-world content diversity (across languages, formats, content types, and adversarial patterns), leveraging LLMs as tools to surface gaps and expand coverage systematically. Define the methodology and coordinate labeling teams for execution.
- Architect severity-stratified and ranking-aware evaluation benchmarks — create tiered datasets aligned with risk severity levels (e.g., critical / high / medium / low) to rigorously assess model performance at each tier, enabling differentiated quality gates, calibrated decision thresholds, and informing recommendation strategies on how to rank and distribute content by risk level.
- Conduct hands-on data analysis and model evaluation — analyze model outputs, compute statistical metrics (precision, recall, F1, confidence intervals, regression analysis), identify failure patterns, and generate actionable insights for algorithm partners.
- Develop and iterate prompts and LLM-based evaluation pipelines — independently author, tune, and optimize prompts for LLM-as-judge and LLM-assisted labeling workflows; diagnose prompt failure modes and drive continuous improvement.
- Drive cross-functional alignment — collaborate with Algorithm, Policy, Recommendation, Labeling, and Data Science teams to translate evaluation findings into model improvement roadmaps, policy refinements, and operational calibration.
- Scale and systematize evaluation operations — identify process gaps, build reusable tooling and frameworks, mentor junior team members, and ensure the evaluation system evolves alongside model and policy complexity.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree or above in Statistics, Computer Science, Data Science, or closely related quantitative fields.
- 5+ years of experience in AI/ML evaluation, model quality assurance, trust -safety product, or data-driven product management — with demonstrated depth in designing evaluation systems or ground truth datasets based on business requirements.
- Strong hands-on data analysis skills — proficient in SQL for statistical analysis, data pipeline work, and ad-hoc investigation.
- Proven experience with LLMs in a professional setting — including prompt engineering, LLM-based evaluation, and iterative optimization of agentic workflows.
- Deep understanding of content safety or trust & safety domains, familiarity with policy frameworks, content moderation challenges, severity classification, and enforcement trade-offs.
- Strong cross-functional leadership, track record of driving alignment across engineering, policy, operations, and data science teams without direct authority.
- Fluency in written and spoken Chinese is needed to manage stakeholders in China market.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building or owning evaluation frameworks for large-scale content moderation or safety AI systems.
- Familiarity with adversarial content patterns, inter-annotator disagreement resolution, and human-in-the-loop quality systems.
- Clear, structured communication skills, able to present complex evaluation results and methodology to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience with recall-oriented evaluation challenges — dealing with imbalanced distributions, long-tail risk categories, and coverage measurement.
- Background in recommendation systems or content ranking — understanding how safety signals interact with distribution and user experience.
- Experience managing or coordinating with labeling/annotation teams at scale.
- Familiarity with agentic AI workflows, multi-step reasoning evaluation, or chain-of-thought assessment.

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $185600 - $374000 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.

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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.

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.

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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 [apply contact hidden]