Head of Digital Rights, Intellectual Property & Privacy Operations - USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture
2 hours ago
Full-time
On-site
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
$132,300 - $316,800 USD yearly
Director
Responsibilities
About the Team
The Safety Regulatory Compliance Operations (SRCO) pillar executes our US legal obligations while navigating global regulatory overlaps. Sitting within Trust & Safety, SRCO spans seven specialized pillars: Legal Response, Child Safety, Privacy, Intellectual Property, Emergency Response, Law Enforcement Outreach, and Safety Compliance Operations (for emerging regulations), all backed by a dedicated Quality Assurance engine. We bridge law enforcement, rights holders, and user privacy to build platform trust through precise, high-integrity execution.
Digital Rights Operations unifies our Intellectual Property (IP) and Privacy Operations pillars into a single, scalable operating system for user, creator, and rights-holder protections in the U.S. market. The function handles copyright and trademark complaints, counter-notifications, and appeals; data subject rights requests; region-change and account-integrity flows; and privacy-driven content removals across established products and emerging entities. By combining rigorous legal execution with product partnership and workflow automation, Digital Rights Operations turns evolving law, policy, and product change into auditable, high-integrity operations that hold up under regulatory and public scrutiny.
Role Description
We are seeking an exceptional operational leader to serve as Head of Digital Rights, leading our Intellectual Property and Privacy Operations pillars.
This role sits at the critical intersection of legal compliance, product architecture, and human-centered leadership. As our platform and regulatory environment continue to scale — new laws, new products, new entity types, and new intake channels — this leader will drive the evolution of Digital Rights Operations into a highly mature, proactive center of operational excellence.
Responsibilities
- Product-to-Operations Bridge: Partner directly with Product, Engineering, Legal, and Policy teams during design and launch reviews (PRDs, feature specs, new-law rollouts) to define "Operational Readiness" for IP and Privacy, identify compliance gaps, and secure downstream response capabilities — including intake, tooling, SOPs, and staffing — before code ships or a new obligation takes effect.
- Intake & Routing Architecture: Own the design of intake surfaces (webforms, dedicated aliases, partner channels) and routing logic for IP complaints, counter-notifications, appeals, and data subject requests, so valid requests reach the right queue quickly and invalid or misdirected requests are rejected or rerouted with minimal manual handling.
- Technical Debt & Root-Cause Remediation: Systematically identify structural friction, manual workarounds, and tooling gaps across IP and Privacy. Work directly with cross-functional partners to automate workflows, harden QA, and modernize operational infrastructure while preserving auditability and review quality.
- Executive & Crisis Escalations: Serve as the ultimate operational point of contact for complex, high-stakes IP and Privacy escalations — from copyright counter-notifications and MediaMatch appeals to legislation-driven data subject requests and public-facing removal disputes — synthesizing operational risk quickly for executive leadership and counsel.
- High-SLA Execution: Maintain exceptional accuracy, quality, and speed across all IP and Privacy queues (including complaint intake, counter-notifications, appeals, DSRs, region-change, and privacy-driven content removals), leveraging data insights to optimize performance, backlog strategy, and workforce planning across employees and vendor support.
- SOP & Workflow Modernization: Continuously refine operational frameworks, protocols, and SOPs to adapt to evolving copyright, privacy, and data-protection standards, new product features, and new entity types (e.g., agencies, sellers, partners). Turn bespoke manual processes into a smaller set of repeatable, systematized workflows.
- Legal, Policy & Global Alignment: Partner closely with USDS JV Legal, Policy, and Global counterparts to settle ownership on decisions that touch both jurisdictions (e.g., appeal path changes, cross-border enforcement, action attribution in Lighthouse/MediaMatch), and ensure U.S. operational execution aligns seamlessly with external stakeholder and rights-holder strategy.
- Pillar Leadership: Direct, mentor, and scale a multi-pillar team spanning IP and Privacy Operations, empowering frontline leads and specialty analysts while maintaining direct line-of-sight to operational realities and ticket-level detail.
- Sustainable Performance: Foster a high-bar culture focused on speed, precision, and continuous learning, while actively driving initiatives around mental wellness, team recognition, and sustainable pacing for teams that regularly handle sensitive rights-holder disputes and privacy-sensitive user data.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications
- Minimum 5 Years of Complex Operations Leadership: Extensive experience leading teams in Intellectual Property Operations, Privacy Operations, Trust & Safety, Data Protection, or complex Legal Operations environments, including direct accountability for legally-driven SLAs.
- Education & Experience: Bachelor's degree required (J.D., Advanced Degree, CIPP/US or equivalent privacy certification, or paralegal certification is a strong plus); or equivalent practical experience in IP operations, privacy operations, or regulatory operations.
- Proven Track Record of Operational Maturity: Demonstrated success taking complex IP or Privacy functions through periods of rapid scale, backlog remediation, process re-engineering, vendor/BPO onboarding, and technical modernization.
- Legal & Technical Fluency: Exceptional ability to grasp complex statutory requirements — including U.S. copyright and DMCA-style processes, state and federal privacy laws, and cross-border data protection standards — and technical system architectures rapidly. (Experience transitioning from government, regulatory, rights-holder, or legal backgrounds into tech operations is highly valued.)
- Self-Directed Curiosity: A natural problem solver who independently learns new technologies, data tools, and legal frameworks to solve root-cause problems in both IP and Privacy domains.
- Product & Engineering Literacy: Comfort evaluating product architecture, reading functional specs, and advocating for IP- and Privacy-specific tooling needs (intake forms, review consoles, action attribution, automation) with Product and Engineering managers.
- Empathetic Leadership: Proven ability to manage high-stress operations while maintaining high morale, psychological safety, and team retention, especially through organizational change, site transitions, and leadership turnover.
Trust & Safety
Content that this role interacts with includes images, video, and text related to every-day life, but it can also include (but is not limited to) bullying; hate speech; child safety; depictions of harm to self and others, and harm to animals. Hence, it is possible that this role will be exposed to harmful content on a daily basis.
TikTok recognises that keeping our platform safe for the TikTok communities is no ordinary job which can be both rewarding and psychologically demanding and emotionally taxing for some. This is why we are sharing the potential hazards, risks and implications in this unique line of work from the start, so our candidates are well informed before joining.
We are committed to the wellbeing of all our employees and promise to provide comprehensive and evidence-based programs, to promote and support physical and mental wellbeing throughout each employee's journey with us. We believe that wellbeing is a relationship and that everyone has a part to play, so we work in collaboration and consultation with our employees and across our functions in order to ensure a truly person-centred, innovative and integrated approach.
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) - Washington, DC
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $ 132300 - $ 316800 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.
About the Team
The Safety Regulatory Compliance Operations (SRCO) pillar executes our US legal obligations while navigating global regulatory overlaps. Sitting within Trust & Safety, SRCO spans seven specialized pillars: Legal Response, Child Safety, Privacy, Intellectual Property, Emergency Response, Law Enforcement Outreach, and Safety Compliance Operations (for emerging regulations), all backed by a dedicated Quality Assurance engine. We bridge law enforcement, rights holders, and user privacy to build platform trust through precise, high-integrity execution.
Digital Rights Operations unifies our Intellectual Property (IP) and Privacy Operations pillars into a single, scalable operating system for user, creator, and rights-holder protections in the U.S. market. The function handles copyright and trademark complaints, counter-notifications, and appeals; data subject rights requests; region-change and account-integrity flows; and privacy-driven content removals across established products and emerging entities. By combining rigorous legal execution with product partnership and workflow automation, Digital Rights Operations turns evolving law, policy, and product change into auditable, high-integrity operations that hold up under regulatory and public scrutiny.
Role Description
We are seeking an exceptional operational leader to serve as Head of Digital Rights, leading our Intellectual Property and Privacy Operations pillars.
This role sits at the critical intersection of legal compliance, product architecture, and human-centered leadership. As our platform and regulatory environment continue to scale — new laws, new products, new entity types, and new intake channels — this leader will drive the evolution of Digital Rights Operations into a highly mature, proactive center of operational excellence.
Responsibilities
- Product-to-Operations Bridge: Partner directly with Product, Engineering, Legal, and Policy teams during design and launch reviews (PRDs, feature specs, new-law rollouts) to define "Operational Readiness" for IP and Privacy, identify compliance gaps, and secure downstream response capabilities — including intake, tooling, SOPs, and staffing — before code ships or a new obligation takes effect.
- Intake & Routing Architecture: Own the design of intake surfaces (webforms, dedicated aliases, partner channels) and routing logic for IP complaints, counter-notifications, appeals, and data subject requests, so valid requests reach the right queue quickly and invalid or misdirected requests are rejected or rerouted with minimal manual handling.
- Technical Debt & Root-Cause Remediation: Systematically identify structural friction, manual workarounds, and tooling gaps across IP and Privacy. Work directly with cross-functional partners to automate workflows, harden QA, and modernize operational infrastructure while preserving auditability and review quality.
- Executive & Crisis Escalations: Serve as the ultimate operational point of contact for complex, high-stakes IP and Privacy escalations — from copyright counter-notifications and MediaMatch appeals to legislation-driven data subject requests and public-facing removal disputes — synthesizing operational risk quickly for executive leadership and counsel.
- High-SLA Execution: Maintain exceptional accuracy, quality, and speed across all IP and Privacy queues (including complaint intake, counter-notifications, appeals, DSRs, region-change, and privacy-driven content removals), leveraging data insights to optimize performance, backlog strategy, and workforce planning across employees and vendor support.
- SOP & Workflow Modernization: Continuously refine operational frameworks, protocols, and SOPs to adapt to evolving copyright, privacy, and data-protection standards, new product features, and new entity types (e.g., agencies, sellers, partners). Turn bespoke manual processes into a smaller set of repeatable, systematized workflows.
- Legal, Policy & Global Alignment: Partner closely with USDS JV Legal, Policy, and Global counterparts to settle ownership on decisions that touch both jurisdictions (e.g., appeal path changes, cross-border enforcement, action attribution in Lighthouse/MediaMatch), and ensure U.S. operational execution aligns seamlessly with external stakeholder and rights-holder strategy.
- Pillar Leadership: Direct, mentor, and scale a multi-pillar team spanning IP and Privacy Operations, empowering frontline leads and specialty analysts while maintaining direct line-of-sight to operational realities and ticket-level detail.
- Sustainable Performance: Foster a high-bar culture focused on speed, precision, and continuous learning, while actively driving initiatives around mental wellness, team recognition, and sustainable pacing for teams that regularly handle sensitive rights-holder disputes and privacy-sensitive user data.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications
- Minimum 5 Years of Complex Operations Leadership: Extensive experience leading teams in Intellectual Property Operations, Privacy Operations, Trust & Safety, Data Protection, or complex Legal Operations environments, including direct accountability for legally-driven SLAs.
- Education & Experience: Bachelor's degree required (J.D., Advanced Degree, CIPP/US or equivalent privacy certification, or paralegal certification is a strong plus); or equivalent practical experience in IP operations, privacy operations, or regulatory operations.
- Proven Track Record of Operational Maturity: Demonstrated success taking complex IP or Privacy functions through periods of rapid scale, backlog remediation, process re-engineering, vendor/BPO onboarding, and technical modernization.
- Legal & Technical Fluency: Exceptional ability to grasp complex statutory requirements — including U.S. copyright and DMCA-style processes, state and federal privacy laws, and cross-border data protection standards — and technical system architectures rapidly. (Experience transitioning from government, regulatory, rights-holder, or legal backgrounds into tech operations is highly valued.)
- Self-Directed Curiosity: A natural problem solver who independently learns new technologies, data tools, and legal frameworks to solve root-cause problems in both IP and Privacy domains.
- Product & Engineering Literacy: Comfort evaluating product architecture, reading functional specs, and advocating for IP- and Privacy-specific tooling needs (intake forms, review consoles, action attribution, automation) with Product and Engineering managers.
- Empathetic Leadership: Proven ability to manage high-stress operations while maintaining high morale, psychological safety, and team retention, especially through organizational change, site transitions, and leadership turnover.
Trust & Safety
Content that this role interacts with includes images, video, and text related to every-day life, but it can also include (but is not limited to) bullying; hate speech; child safety; depictions of harm to self and others, and harm to animals. Hence, it is possible that this role will be exposed to harmful content on a daily basis.
TikTok recognises that keeping our platform safe for the TikTok communities is no ordinary job which can be both rewarding and psychologically demanding and emotionally taxing for some. This is why we are sharing the potential hazards, risks and implications in this unique line of work from the start, so our candidates are well informed before joining.
We are committed to the wellbeing of all our employees and promise to provide comprehensive and evidence-based programs, to promote and support physical and mental wellbeing throughout each employee's journey with us. We believe that wellbeing is a relationship and that everyone has a part to play, so we work in collaboration and consultation with our employees and across our functions in order to ensure a truly person-centred, innovative and integrated approach.
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) - Washington, DC
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $ 132300 - $ 316800 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.