Trust & Safety Policy Lead

About The Role:

Outschool is seeking a Trust & Safety Policy Lead to serve as the architect of our community standards. In this role, you will be responsible for defining, refining, and enforcing the policies that keep Outschool the safest, most trusted learning marketplace for K-12 learners.

This role requires a blend of analytical rigor, precise communication, and deep empathy for our diverse user base:

• Policy Architect: You don't just enforce rules; you write them. You will draft and iterate on community guidelines that balance safety with our mission to inspire learning.
• Subject Matter Expert: You will serve as the "go-to" person for complex, gray-area escalations, applying nuanced judgment to sensitive situations.
• Cross-Functional Partner: You will collaborate closely with Legal, Product, and Customer Support to ensure our policies are legally compliant, operationally enforceable, and technically scalable.
• Data-Driven Operator: You will analyze safety trends and incident data to proactively identify gaps in our policies before they become problems.
• Forward-Looking Strategist: You proactively monitor industry trends, emerging risks, and evolving legal and policy landscapes, translating insights into actionable improvements to our approach. You are comfortable operating in ambiguity, willing to experiment with new ideas, and motivated to stay at the forefront of innovation in Trust & Safety.

At Outschool, our titles focus on impact rather than hierarchy. While this is an Individual Contributor role, you will have significant autonomy to shape the safety culture of our platform.

Core Responsibilities:

• Policy Development: Own the lifecycle of Trust & Safety policies. Draft, review, and update Community Standards, Educator Requirements, and Learner Safety guidelines to reflect evolving business needs, emerging risks, and industry trends. Proactively identify new abuse vectors, platform misuse, and regulatory developments translating insights into forward-looking policy updates.
• Complex Escalations: Act as the final point of escalation for high-stakes or "gray area" safety incidents, investigating cases with sound judgment and discretion to determine fair, consistent outcomes.
• Sensitive Communications: Draft and refine customer-facing messaging for high-stakes safety and policy issues, ensuring communications related to bans, warnings, or sensitive inquiries are empathetic, clear, and operationally sound.
• Regulatory Compliance: Partner with Legal to ensure platform policies align with global regulations (e.g., COPPA, GDPR-K, KCSSIE) and emerging AI safety standards.
• Operational Playbooks & Enablement: Translate high-level policies into clear, actionable Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and partner with Operations and Support teams to train and enable consistent, high-quality enforcement.
• Product Collaboration: Work with Product and Engineering to translate policy requirements into scalable product solutions (e.g., moderation tooling, keyword filters, AI detection systems).
• Quality Assurance & Policy Effectiveness: Conduct audits of enforcement actions to ensure consistency and fairness, while defining and tracking key metrics (e.g., incident rates, false positives, user reports) to evaluate and continuously improve policy effectiveness.
• External Representation & Industry Engagement: Serve as a representative of Trust & Safety externally, engaging with industry groups, coalitions, and partners to stay at the forefront of best practices and bring insights back to inform Outschool’s approach.

Desired Experience & Skills:

• 6+ years of experience in Trust & Safety, Content Policy, or Risk Management within tech or marketplace platforms.
• Strong Writing Skills: Ability to write clear, concise, and jargon-free policies for external audiences (parents/educators) and internal audiences.
• Nuanced Judgment: Demonstrated ability to make difficult decisions in ambiguous situations where there is no "right" answer.
• Analytical Mindset: Experience using data to identify abuse trends and measure the effectiveness of policy changes.
• Knowledge of Child Safety: Familiarity with youth safety standards, COPPA, or education-specific safety concerns is a strong plus.
• Tech-Savvy & AI-Forward: CComfortable with moderation tools and ticketing systems (e.g., Zendesk, Jira), and partnering with technical teams. Experience in user-generated content platforms, marketplaces, with an AI-forward approach to improving detection and enforcement.
• Crisis Management: Experience handling high-severity incidents or crisis response

Outschool recruits across the US and Canada, and sets employee salaries to reflect local compensation and cost of living. For New York and California candidates, as well as candidates based in Seattle, WA, the annual salary range for this role is $140,000 - $192,000. For Washington candidates outside of Seattle, as well as Colorado candidates, the salary range for this role is $135,000 - $185,000.

We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on March 21, 2024.

Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here.