Policy Lead, Search & Trust—Safety & Impact

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 122,000 - 272,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Short-term and long-term disability

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

10 paid holidays per year

Paid sick days

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Policy Manager, Search - Trust and Safety in San Jose to lead policy development and governance for search features and AI-related ranking. You will work with product, ML, and legal teams to translate concepts into actionable requirements and roadmaps, guiding risk-aware launches and ongoing policy refinement.

You will also design evaluation suites, address Generative AI risks, and act as the final policy authority during high-stakes search escalations, ensuring user safety

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in product policy, trust and safety, legal tech, regulatory compliance, or content moderation strategy within a technology company.
• Experience translating policy concepts into user-centric product requirements and roadmaps.
• Experience drafting or enforcing policies targeting Large Language Models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or multimodal search systems.
• Proven track record of evaluating complex trade-offs between free expression, user safety, and product quality.
• Ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives without formal authority over team members.
• Exceptional communication skills, with extensive experience drafting formal policy documents and presenting to executives.
• Ability to independently analyze enforcement data and policy impact metrics.

Responsibilities

• Identify and anticipate product and content safety risks to support new launches of Search policies, products and features, leveraging solutions to effectively address the risks by optimizing policy iteration & implementation procedures to let our users engage with a safe content ecosystem.
• Support the safe and responsible development and go-to-market of Search features help with search and discovery on TikTok, by conducting pre-launch impact assessments to identify and mitigate potential real‑world product harms.
• Author and maintain policies governing search indexing, ranking, and AI features (e.g., AI Overviews, Snippets).
• Work closely with cross‑functional partners and internal experts to understand emerging trends or risks and partner with PMs and ML engineers to code policy rules directly into ranking algorithms and automated moderation models.
• Proactively address policy gaps driven by Generative AI, LLMs, and evolving user query behaviors.
• Design benchmarks and evaluation suites to measure policy enforcement accuracy, false positives, and algorithmic bias.
• Act as the final policy authority for high‑stakes, real‑time search escalations during breaking news and global crises.

Skills

Policy management

Trust and safety

Executive communication

Cross-functional leadership

Policy drafting for LLMs

Regulatory compliance

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Policy Manager, Search - Trust and Safety in San Jose to lead policy development and governance for search features and AI-related ranking. You will work with product, ML, and legal teams to translate concepts into actionable requirements and roadmaps, guiding risk-aware launches and ongoing policy refinement.

You will also design evaluation suites, address Generative AI risks, and act as the final policy authority during high-stakes search escalations, ensuring user safety