Program Manager, Detection & Enforcement, Youth Safety

EngineersOfAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Discord is seeking a Program Manager, Detection & Enforcement, Youth Safety to lead product and process initiatives across minor safety remit. You will coordinate with product, tooling, and engineering teams, driving improvements in detection and response.

The role involves handling sensitive content with trauma-informed practices and collaborating with multiple stakeholders to enhance safety for youth. You will also help guide ML tooling and detection strategies, partner on policy development,

Qualifications

• In depth knowledge of child sexual exploitation investigation, detection, and reporting obligations for industry.
• Intermediate SQL proficiency and technical skills.
• A Bachelor’s degree.
• Program management experience establishing and driving operational projects at scale.
• Ability to create effective relationships, influence, and collaborate at all organizational levels.
• Experience analyzing and mitigating high-impact threats and online threat actors.
• Proven leadership in developing, articulating, and advocating policies and strategies relating to teen and child safety.

Responsibilities

• Drive product and process improvements.
• Own product and process improvements for all NCMEC reports, CSAM enforcement, and other child sexual exploitation harms.
• Manage the tooling roadmap for the team, develop and prioritize tool requests.
• Audit operations and report handling, in collaboration with QA, to drive continuous improvement.
• Partner with Product Operations teams to ensure workflows and tools support launches.
• Advise and guide efforts by supporting Discord stakeholder teams across departments.
• Ensure delivery of high quality, trauma-informed, person-centered services to prevent crimes against children.
• Work cross functionally on ML tooling for detection and automated enforcement.
• Develop heuristic models for detection across content types, regions, and languages.
• Assess image hashing and CSAM classifiers; drive roadmap goals for detection improvements.
• Conduct comprehensive product audits and leverage data insights for safety initiatives.
• Make recommendations for large-scale safety initiatives and strategic plans.

Skills

Program management

SQL

Stakeholder management

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Job description

Discord has a highly engaged community of millions of daily active users who use the platform for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does: play video games. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming, and we are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to hang out before, during, and after playing games.

As the Program Manager, Detection & Enforcement, Youth Safety on the Youth Safety team, you will program manage product and process initiatives that drive more effective and efficient mitigations across the minor safety remit. You will serve as the internal subject matter expert across product, detection, tooling, and bugs, including working with XFN teams to drive safety improvements. You will report into the Senior Manager of Youth Safety.

Please note: This role involves exposure to potentially disturbing topics such as child sexual abuse material, exploitation imagery, and grooming-related content. Wellness support is provided.

What You’ll be Doing:

• Drive product and process improvements
  • Recommend and drive youth safety initiatives that reduce average handle time, escalation rates, and help identify additional harms
  • Own product and process improvements for all NCMEC reports, CSAM enforcement, and other child sexual exploitation harms
  • Manage the tooling roadmap for the team, develop and prioritize tool requests
  • Audit operations and report handling, in collaboration with our QA team, to identify processing gaps and root cause issues to drive continuous improvement in detection, moderation, and tooling
  • Partner with our Product Operations teams to ensure internal workflows and tools are supportive of new product launches
  • Advise and guide efforts by supporting Discord stakeholder teams, including Vendor Operations, Data Engineering, Threat Research, and Policy to incorporate user safety initiatives, projects, and planning
  • Ensure delivery of high quality, trauma-informed, person-centered services to prevent crimes against children and other vulnerable populations
• Manage and drive the proactive detection roadmap:
  • Work cross functionally with our Safety product team to develop ML tooling for detection and automated enforcement of high-harm groups and behavior
  • Work with engineering to build out heuristic models for detection across content types, regions, and languages and harms
  • Work with engineering to assess the effectiveness of image hashing, novel CSAM classifiers, and other detection for CSAM content; drive roadmap goals for detection improvements
• Act as the liaison between our team and Product and Engineering:
  • Conduct comprehensive product audits to understand where we can deliver more impact for young people, driving policy, product, tooling, and process recommendations
  • Leverage data insights and strategic communication to make recommendations for large-scale initiatives and validate the safety-related impact and tradeoffs

What You Should Have:

• In depth knowledge of child sexual exploitation investigation, detection, and reporting obligations for industry, equivalent of 6-10 years of project or program management
• Intermediate SQL Proficiency and technical skills
• A Bachelor’s degree
• Program management experience establishing and driving operational projects at scale
• Ability to create effective relationships, influence, and collaborate at all organizational levels
• Demonstrated experience with organizational capacity, namely building and strengthening teams at scale, as well as building and strengthening stakeholder partnerships
• Experience analyzing and mitigating high-impact threats and online threat actors, with a track record of managing tactical and strategic initiatives resulting in measurable change
• Proven leadership in developing, articulating, and advocating policies and strategies relating to teen and child safety

Preferred Qualifications (bonus points):

• Direct experience in creating and up-leveling harm detection strategies such as ML models, image hashing, or user reports