Strategic Policy Lead, Search Safety

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

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Policy Manager, Search Policy, within the Trust & Safety team to shape safety and editorial policies for TikTok Search. You will lead risk assessment, policy development, and transparency for new features while partnering with product, enforcement, legal, and business teams.

This role blends strategic guidance with hands-on policy coding and rapid response during crises. The role demands strong communication, experience with AI policy frameworks, and the ability to balance

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 complex 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 ability to evaluate trade-offs between free expression, user safety, and product quality.
• Strong track record leading cross-functional technical initiatives without formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Identify and anticipate product and content safety risks to support launches of Search policies, products and features.
• Conduct pre-launch impact assessments to identify and mitigate potential real-world harms.
• Author and maintain policies governing search indexing, ranking, and AI features.
• Collaborate with PMs, ML engineers, and legal to code policy rules into ranking algorithms and moderation models.
• Address policy gaps driven by Generative AI, LLMs, and evolving user queries.
• Design benchmarks and evaluation suites to measure policy enforcement accuracy and error rates.
• Serve as final policy authority for high-stakes, real-time search escalations during major events.

Skills

Policy drafting

Cross-functional leadership

Enforcement data analysis

LLMs policies

Product lifecycle translation

Executive communication

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Policy Manager, Search Policy, within the Trust & Safety team to shape safety and editorial policies for TikTok Search. You will lead risk assessment, policy development, and transparency for new features while partnering with product, enforcement, legal, and business teams.

This role blends strategic guidance with hands-on policy coding and rapid response during crises. The role demands strong communication, experience with AI policy frameworks, and the ability to balance