Frontier AI Policy Scientist - Trust & Safety

TikTok; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 108,000 - 209,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) with match

Paid parental leave

Wellbeing benefits

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Technical AI Policy Researcher to advance responsible AI across our frontier models, partnering with safety researchers, engineers, and product teams. You will design policies, evaluate risks, and help operationalize safeguards to ensure safe, fair, and trustworthy AI at scale.

You will translate risk models into concrete requirements, drive end-to-end policy workflows from pre-launch to post-launch, and collaborate with external experts to strengthen policy defensibility and

Qualifications

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Trust & Safety

Policy Research

AI Safety

Governance

Stakeholder Engagement

Education

Advanced degree

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Technical AI Policy Researcher to advance responsible AI across our frontier models, partnering with safety researchers, engineers, and product teams. You will design policies, evaluate risks, and help operationalize safeguards to ensure safe, fair, and trustworthy AI at scale.

You will translate risk models into concrete requirements, drive end-to-end policy workflows from pre-launch to post-launch, and collaborate with external experts to strengthen policy defensibility and