Trust & Safety Lead - Education

About Playlab

Playlab is a tech non-profit dedicated to helping educators and students become critical consumers and creators of AI.

We believe that an open-source, community-driven approach is key to harnessing the potential of AI in education. We equip educators & students to build custom AI apps for their unique context. Over 100,000 educators have published apps on Playlab.

At Playlab, we believe that AI is a new design material, one that should be shaped by many to bring their ideas about learning to life. If you're passionate about building creative, equitable futures for students and teachers, we hope you'll join us.

About the role

Playlab is looking for a Trust & Safety Lead to own safety on our platform, with a focus on children and young adults. We’ve built Playlab with responsibility in mind, but this work is an ongoing commitment to the students and educators we serve.

You'll make the calls on live incidents, moderation escalations and safety policy. Just as important, you'll help design the systems that catch problems automatically, so people step in only where human judgment matters.

Educators use Playlab to build AI apps for their own classrooms. That means our safety work covers two things: how the AI behaves, and what people build and do with it. Responsible AI in education is a young field, so many of the playbooks you'll run haven't been written yet. You'll write them.

This role owns the decision. When something happens, you decide what to do: suspend an account, take down an app, notify a school, file a required report. You'll bring in leadership for the rare calls that need it, and keep the relevant folks informed about what you did and why.

You'll report to our CTO and work closely with product, engineering, learning engineering and partnerships, as well as the people leading our responsible AI and privacy work.

What you'll do

Build the systems that catch problems

• Learn what "bad" looks like here. Review flagged content, hunt for misuse our filters miss, and try to build apps that break our policies. Stress-test features before and after they ship, and grow a community of internal and partner testers who do this with you.

• Define what our systems should catch. Build a Playlab-specific harm taxonomy and clear labeling guidelines, so people and systems judge content the same way.

• Turn what you find into examples we can build on. Collect what you see in reviews, hunts and red teaming into labeled sets engineering can use to build and test detection.

• Write the requirements. Spell out what our filters, rules and signals need to catch and what good looks like. Engineering builds it; you decide whether it's working.

• Track how well detection works. How much we catch automatically versus what a person finds, how often we flag things that are fine, and how long problems go unnoticed. The goal is for people to spend their time on the calls that need human judgment.

Own incidents end to end

• Lead incident response. Triage, investigation, action, school communication, required reporting and post-incident review. You're the first responder and the decision-maker.

• Make urgent issues reach you fast. Work with Support on intake and escalation paths so anything urgent gets to you the same day.

Turn patterns into policy

• Write and maintain our safety and moderation policies, including what schools can and can't adjust, so frontline teams can apply them consistently. Work with our privacy and security lead where policies touch student data.

• Review safety at launch. Act as the safety reviewer for new features, raising risks early enough to change the design.

Be the safety voice for schools and partners

• Work directly with school and district leaders who raise safety concerns, with care, clarity and urgency.

• Build the processes, training and resources our learning partners (many who are former school leaders) need to report incidents and handle safety situations with their schools.

Keep the team informed

• Turn themes from incidents, reviews and hunts into clear input for the product roadmap.

• Track incident volume, response times, policy coverage and trends, and report regularly to leadership.

What the job is really like

• About half proactive, half reactive. Roughly half your time goes to review, hunting and red teaming, and half to incidents, policy and schools. Reactive work always tries to take over, so we'll protect the proactive half with you.

• You'll build some of your own tools. Part of your first few months will be shaping any new search, reporting and testing tools to enhance your work, working with engineering.

• You'll be the primary escalation point. Incidents don't keep office hours. You'll be first in line for urgent safety issues, with backup coverage so it's sustainable.

• You'll work with student data carefully. Access follows a clear policy aligned with our school and district agreements.

• The work can be hard to see. Proactive safety work on a platform used by young people can mean encountering disturbing material, including content involving harm to children. You will help set the standard for handling procedures and support for the people who do the work.

You might be a fit if you...

We're looking for a strong and creative operator with a bias toward action, who gets excited about building new systems. You're passionate about education, steady under pressure, rigorous about process, and eager to build what doesn't exist yet.

• Care deeply about student wellbeing, equity and access, and believe we can set a new bar for safe AI in education

• Have 5+ years in trust & safety, including real time as the decision-maker on high-stakes escalations

• Have strong intuition for the responsible or safe choice when there's no obvious right answer, and can explain your thinking clearly

• Have handled safety work involving young people: disclosures of self-harm or abuse, inappropriate contact, CSAM reporting, or similar

• Have helped design how problems get caught automatically: you've written labeling guidelines, defined what a filter should catch and checked whether it worked. You don't need to be an engineer, but you work well with them

• Love building the human side of the system too: intake forms, triage rubrics, runbooks, training materials and dashboards

• Write policies that are principled and practical, so frontline teams can apply them consistently

• Stay calm, clear and thorough under pressure, and know when to act, when to slow down and when to bring others in

• Communicate well with a worried school leader, an engineer and a learning partner in the same day, including asynchronously and remotely

Bonus points for...

• Enjoying breaking things, and have hands-on experience finding where generative AI tools fail

• Experience with AI red teaming, evaluations or adversarial testing

• Experience doing proactive investigations or abuse hunting, not only queue work or escalation management

• Experience on platforms with user-generated content or creator tools (app review, UGC moderation, marketplace integrity)

• Familiarity with student privacy and child safety frameworks (FERPA, COPPA, state student data privacy laws, mandated reporting)

• Classroom, school leadership, counseling or edtech experience

• Having built trust & safety operations from scratch at a startup or nonprofit

Why join us?

Real impact: Your work directly protects the educators and students using Playlab every day, and shapes what safe AI in education looks like across the field.

Real ownership: You'll make the calls and design the policies, processes and tools that define trust & safety at Playlab.

Room to grow: As Playlab and our safety work grow, so does this role, with significant opportunities for learning and growth.

Mission-aligned team: Join a small, passionate group committed to equity, creativity and joyful learning, backed by the Gates Foundation, Google, CZI and the Schwab Foundation.

Flexible work: Remote-first, with autonomy and a strong culture of collaboration.

Competitive pay and benefits: Competitive salary, healthcare covered 100% for you and 80% for dependents, dental/vision covered 100% for you and dependents, retirement, Life/AD&D, monthly wellness stipend, home office budget, new laptop, generous time off and opportunities for professional growth.