Manager, Strategic Projects (Safety)

Handshake•Seattle, WA

2d•$225,000 - $250,000

About The Position

As a Manager, Strategic Projects, Safety, you will lead a portfolio of complex, high-stakes human data programs that support frontier AI model training and evaluation. You will set operational and quality strategy for model evaluation across frontier risks, designing scalable workflows, quality systems, and team structures across multiple policy domains. You will manage and develop Strategic Projects Leads and trusted model trainers, coaching sound judgment on nuanced safety decisions while ensuring consistent delivery across quality, throughput, and cost. As a thought partner to frontier AI labs and internal leaders, you will make high-stakes decisions with limited guidance, shape program scope, and translate operational insight into stronger policies, evaluations, and customer outcomes. The role is high-ownership and outcomes-driven, requiring comfort with ambiguity, incomplete information, and accountability for results at scale. The role involves exposure to sensitive or explicit content, including violent, sexual, or otherwise disturbing material, as part of safety and policy evaluation work.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in trust and safety, policy enforcement, regulatory compliance, risk management, operations, consulting, government, or a 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.
A track record of building scalable processes, developing others, and creating a high-accountability, high-quality team culture.
Curiosity and the ability to quickly build fluency in technical AI concepts, model behavior, and industry trends.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading safety-policy, content-review, or evaluation operations across large, distributed workforces.
Subject-matter expertise in high-severity policy harms, including violent activities, dangerous organizations or individuals, sexual activities, CBRN, cyber, or related domains.
Experience designing and scaling AI safety evaluations, annotation taxonomies, quality systems, or adversarial-testing programs.
Experience working directly with frontier AI labs or other highly technical enterprise customers.

Responsibilities

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 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.