Technical AI Policy Researcher, Frontier Risk - Trust and Safety

Technical AI Policy Researcher, Frontier Risk - Trust and Safety at TikTok in San Francisco, CA.

Responsibilities

The Trust & Safety (T&S) Responsible AI Policy team's mission is to ensure the development of GenAI models and applications are safe, fair and trustworthy. We do this by defining, measuring and mitigating safety and fairness AI model risks through policy frameworks, model risk assessments, and upstream policy solutions.

The T&S Responsible AI Policy team sits within the T&S GenAI and Emerging Products pillar. We work closely with Trust & Safety teams (product policy, product, engineering, data science, operations, red teaming), business and model teams, and cross-functional stakeholders (comms, legal, public policy) across global markets. Success in this team requires strong policy acumen, judgment, creativity, analytical rigour, and the ability to translate Generative AI risk to different stakeholders effectively.

As a Technical AI Policy Researcher on the T&S Responsible AI Policy team, you will champion the responsible development and deployment of our frontier AI models across multiple businesses with a specialty on technical research for frontier risks. You will accelerate technical policy research, incubate new research efforts, and drive end-to-end policy to evaluate workflows for your domain areas.

• Design and maintain multimodal GenAI policies across safety-relevant domains, including frontier risk in agentic modalities, loss of control or deceptive misalignment.
• Translate risk and harm models into clear behavioral specifications, evaluation criteria, grading guidance, and system-level safeguards.
• Define practical boundaries between beneficial uses of AI and assistance that could materially enable harm, exploitation, misuse, or unsafe outcomes.
• Build policy artifacts that support model training, evaluation, and deployment. Partner with safety researchers, engineers, product teams, and other stakeholders to operationalize policy into scalable model behavior and measurable safeguards.
• Design end-to-end policy to pre-launch evaluation to post-launch monitoring workflows across safety-relevant domains, including golden set construction, labeling guidance, calibration, adjudication, and eval coverage analysis, to ensure policies can be reliably measured and improved.
• Use red-teaming results, deployment data, model failures, over-refusals, under-refusals, and ambiguous edge cases to improve policy and evaluation quality over time.
• Identify emerging capability areas where frontier AI systems could create new safety, fairness or bias challenges or lower barriers to harm.
• Monitor post-launch model activity to identify gaps in our policy framework to capture unsafe model behaviour.
• Champion research to strengthen the defensibility and operability of policy positions, including working with Outreach and Partnerships to incorporate external expert input into relevant policy positions.
• Combine longer-horizon safety research with hands-on launch and deployment work.
• Contribute to risk reports, policy documentation, launch reviews, and AI governance reviews on the company's approach to building AI responsibly.
• Support regulatory teams as a subject matter expert on AI compliance related initiatives.

Requirements

• 5 years in Trust & Safety, AI Safety Research, AI Ethics, technical AI Governance, or equivalent experience.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Engineering, Data Science or quantitative Social Sciences
• Direct experience in frontier risk research, AI evaluations, red-teaming, or AI governance work.
• Strong technical understanding of LLM, multimodel, or genmedia model behavior, model failure modes, and safety risks.
• Demonstrated experience working with external experts and stakeholders, including civil society, government, and academia.
• Demonstrated success working in a fast-paced technology company or research organization conducting AI impact, risk assessments or algorithmic audits, and/or data science or product development related experience.
• Ability to advocate for safety amongst a wide variety of business stakeholders including Product Policy, Engineering, Public Policy, Legal, Communications, and Data Science.

Preferred Qualifications

• Technical knowledge in high efficiency on device architectures, multimodal understanding, V&V of AI systems, or RAG is beneficial but not required.
• Experience working with governments, frontier AI companies, or AI Safety organizations.
• Experience working in non-western cultures, with a particular emphasis on the global south.
• Understanding of Trust & Safety positioning in the entertainment media technology sector, with comfort learning internal tools and product workflows.

Job Information

[For Pay Transparency] Compensation Description (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 Company

The Global Business Solutions (GBS) team is responsible for the revenue growth of the TikTok business, and our teams include Sales, Marketing, Ops, Account Managers, Agency and partnerships, as well as Marketing Science.

At TikTok, our Global Business Solutions (GBS) team plays a key role in generating revenue by promoting our advertising solutions, onboarding new clients, driving ad campaigns, and more. As the TikTok community grows at an unprecedented speed around the world, our GBS team leads groundbreaking projects that are changing the landscape of the advertising industry in real time.

We're seeking an analytically driven, and detail-oriented Client Solutions Manager (CSM) Intern to join our Ecommerce Team. As a CSM, you will partner closely with Client Partners and Client Solutions Managers to drive revenue by identifying opportunities, leveraging data insights, and delivering consultative solutions for advertisers.

This role centers on client education, relationship growth, data analysis, and campaign success. You will provide strategic recommendations to both clients and internal teams, ensuring campaigns achieve business objectives while optimizing long-term partnerships. Success in this role requires strong data analytics skills, adaptability in a fast-paced environment, and a test-and-learn mindset to uncover the best solutions.

Additional Information

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.