AI Safety Engineer

Hark; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Hark, located in San Jose, California, is seeking a Member of Technical Staff (Safety Generalist) to enhance its safety protocols. The role involves designing and implementing classifiers that detect harmful content and behavior while overseeing these systems in production.

The ideal candidate should have 3-7 years of experience in trust & safety, solid knowledge of building ML systems, and a genuine motivation for safety problems. This full-time role offers a competitive salary ranging from $150,000 to $300,000 annually.

Qualifications

• 3–7 years of experience in trust & safety, content moderation, or a closely related field.
• Hands-on experience building and shipping ML classifiers or detection systems.
• Comfortable operating production systems with incident response experience.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and ship content moderation classifiers and pipelines.
• Own safety systems end-to-end, from model development through production monitoring.
• Investigate abuse patterns and implement technical mitigations.

Skills

Trust & safety experience

Content moderation

Problem-solving

Hands-on ML experience

Job description

About Hark

Hark is an artificial intelligence company building advanced, personalized intelligence. One that is proactive, multimodal, and capable of interacting with the world through speech, text, vision, and persistent memory.

We're pairing that intelligence with next-generation hardware to create a universal interface between humans and machines. While today's AI largely operates through chat boxes and decade-old devices, Hark is focused on what comes next: agentic systems that interact naturally with people and the real world.

To get there, we're developing multimodal models and next-generation AI hardware together - designed from the ground up as a single, unified interface for a new era of intelligent systems.

About the Role

We're hiring a Member of Technical Staff (Safety Generalist) to join our Safety team. This is a build-and-operate role: you'll design and ship classifiers, pipelines, and tooling that detect and respond to harmful content and behavior on the platform — and then own those systems in production. You'll work closely with engineering, policy, and leadership to define what "safe" looks like at Hark and build the infrastructure to enforce it.

This is not a pure ML role and not a pure ops role. We're looking for someone who can do both.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and ship content moderation classifiers and detection pipelines.
• Own safety systems end-to-end: from model development through production monitoring and incident response.
• Investigate abuse patterns and translate findings into durable technical mitigations.
• Partner with policy and legal to operationalize safety standards into scalable systems.
• Contribute to the safety roadmap and help define what we build next.

Requirements

• 3–7 years of experience in trust & safety, content moderation, or a closely related field.
• Hands‑on experience building and shipping ML classifiers or detection systems (not just running them).
• Comfort operating production systems — you've held a pager, triaged incidents, and shipped fixes under pressure.
• Strong problem‑solving instincts and the ability to work across ambiguous, high‑stakes problems.
• Genuine motivation to work on safety problems — you care about why this work matters.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience at a T&S-focused company (Cinder, Hive AI, Thorn, Modulate, Discord Safety, etc.).
• Familiarity with multimodal content (text, voice, image) moderation.
• Background in CSAM detection, integrity engineering, or platform abuse.

Compensation

The US base salary range for this full-time position is between $150,000 - $300,000 annually.

The pay offered for this position may vary based on several individual factors, including job‑related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package may also include additional components/benefits depending on the specific role. This information will be shared if an employment offer is extended.