5-7 years of experience in trust & safety, content policy, or product compliance at a consumer platform with user-generated content.
Proficient in SQL and basic Python for data analysis and workflow scripting.
Demonstrated ability to automate manual review processes through classifiers and tooling.
Strong understanding of regulatory frameworks like GDPR and the EU Digital Services Act.
Experience in leading teams and developing internal principles on user safety.
Responsibilities
Own and optimize the safety function to reduce manual review while maintaining or improving outcomes.
Build and evaluate detection systems, measuring their effectiveness through precision and recall metrics.
Conduct cost-benefit analyses for safety-related actions, providing clear justifications for decisions.
Stay updated on regulatory requirements and translate them into actionable guidance for the company.
Lead product initiatives to ensure compliance while focusing on automation to minimize costs.
Develop and mentor team members, hiring strategically based on operational needs.
Communicate directly and transparently, fostering a culture of critical thinking and informed decision-making.
Benefits
Direct access to leadership and engineering resources.
Opportunity to shape the company's approach to user safety and compliance.
Broad charter with significant room for growth and influence.
Work in a lean, innovative environment focused on efficiency and effectiveness.
Full Job Description
The Role
As Head of Safety, you own compliance end-to-end across content safety, user data, and platform transparency - from the moderation queue and the classifiers behind it to regulatory calls, product roadmap, and the systems that make the function smaller every quarter.
This is not a pure moderation role and not a policy-memo role. We are a lean company and intend to stay one: every hour of manual review, every vendor contract, and every classifier you tune is a cost, and you're expected to know what each one buys us. We need someone technical enough to build and test the systems that get us there, not just specify them - someone who instinctively reaches for the numbers before reaching for headcount. What We're Looking For
You own the safety function and shrink its manual footprint - improving the accuracy, automation, and cost-efficiency of content moderation until the same or better outcomes take materially less human review each quarter. You define the metrics behind it (queue volume, review time, appeal and reversal rates, cost per action, escalation latency) and build the dashboards that surface them without you in the loop.
You build and evaluate detection systems hands-on - test sets, precision and recall, thresholds tuned against the real cost of false positives versus false negatives - and run the evals that tell you whether a change helped or just felt better. You've shipped changes to a detection or review system and can say how you measured them.
You run cost-benefit on every action - before we invest in a policy, a tool, a vendor, or a review process, you can say what risk it reduces, what it costs to run, and what the cheaper alternative is. You reason in expected value: likelihood of harm, severity, cost to mitigate, cost to ignore. You can defend a decision to not do something, and you apply the same discipline to your own time, including knowing when to stop optimizing.
You stay ahead of regulation and keep the compliance picture live - GDPR, the EU Digital Services Act, UK online safety and investigatory powers legislation, cyberbullying and minor-protection rules, and emerging regimes - translated into plain-language guidance the whole company can act on, and into an honest, current map of where the product meets its obligations, where the gaps are, what they cost to close, and what happens if we don't.
You lead product work - driving the roadmap toward holistic compliance with a heavy bias to automation, so safety doesn't become a permanent cost center. You scope it with engineering as a peer.
You build the team and set the position - developing existing teammates to own more of day-to-day operations, hiring where the math justifies it, defining Medal's internal principles and external voice on user safety in step with our brand and culture, and bringing research on real risk exposure so leadership sizes safety spend deliberately rather than reactively.
You bring experience leading trust & safety, content policy, or product compliance at a consumer platform, ideally one with user-generated content at scale, plus a track record of automating manual review away through classifiers, tooling, vendor systems, or policy design that kills edge cases. You're comfortable in SQL and write enough Python to pull your own data, build an eval harness, and script a workflow - you don't file a ticket to find out how many items hit a queue last week. You know what classifiers and LLM-based review can and can't do, how to evaluate a vendor's claims, and where the failure modes are, without needing to train models yourself.
You're direct - you look for the flaws in a plan, ask the skeptical question, and say the uncomfortable thing early rather than late, both as a manager and when reporting up, so hard decisions get made with good information.
This is a broad charter with room to grow: you'll be the company's center of gravity on digital trust and compliance, with direct access to leadership, engineering resources to build with, and the latitude to shape how Medal thinks about user safety as the regulatory landscape keeps shifting.
