Manager, Strategic AI Safety Projects

Handshake; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in fast-growing company

401(k) match and financial coaching

Parental leave and fertility benefits

Medical, dental, vision, mental health

Job summary

Handshake seeks a Manager, Strategic Projects, Safety to lead a portfolio of complex human data programs powering frontier AI model training and evaluation. You will set operational and quality strategy across policy domains, designing scalable workflows and audit systems for ambiguous work.

You will coach a team of Strategic Projects Leads, partner with frontier labs and senior stakeholders, and drive improvements in safety policies, evaluations, and customer outcomes at scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in trust and safety, policy enforcement, risk management, operations, consulting, government, or related field, including people-management experience.
• 2+ years managing high performing teams in fast paced, execution focused environments.
• Demonstrated success leading multiple complex, high-stakes programs and managing teams in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
• Deep operational judgment and the ability to make clear quality-throughput-cost tradeoffs across complex human-data workflows.
• Exceptional written, verbal, and stakeholder-management skills, with experience partnering directly with senior customers and cross-functional leaders.

Responsibilities

• Partner directly with frontier AI labs and senior stakeholde
• Lead a portfolio of complex safety and evaluation programs across policy domains and frontier risks
• Manage, coach, and develop Strategic Projects Leads; establish clear goals, accountability, and strong task-quality judgment.
• Set and establish the quality bar across programs by designing scalable annotation frameworks, taxonomies, assessments, instructions, and audit systems for complex and ambiguous policy work.
• Partner directly with frontier AI labs and senior stakeholders to shape scope, resolve high-stakes issues, identify policy and coverage gaps, and build durable customer relationships.
• Use data and first-principles reasoning to diagnose systemic quality or operational issues, make explicit tradeoffs, and drive structural improvements across the portfolio.
• Build and scale playbooks, processes, and AI-enabled workflows that improve consistency, efficiency, and delivery reliability across teams.
• Surface emerging risk patterns, labeling inconsistencies, and strategic opportunities that strengthen safety policies and evaluation coverage.

Skills

People management

Program leadership

Stakeholder management

Operational judgment

AI concepts fluency

Job description

Handshake seeks a Manager, Strategic Projects, Safety to lead a portfolio of complex human data programs powering frontier AI model training and evaluation. You will set operational and quality strategy across policy domains, designing scalable workflows and audit systems for ambiguous work.

You will coach a team of Strategic Projects Leads, partner with frontier labs and senior stakeholders, and drive improvements in safety policies, evaluations, and customer outcomes at scale.