Responsibilities

The Trust & Safety (T&S) Policy team is dedicated to fostering a safe, inclusive, and positive environment across our platforms. We develop, refine, and enforce community policies that guide user behavior and content creation, ensuring our global community can express themselves freely while being protected from harm. Our work is critical in maintaining user trust and platform integrity.

We are seeking an experienced and strategic leader to serve as the Head of Global Policy Development within our Trust & Safety organization. In this critical role, you will lead a global team of policy experts responsible for creating the principles, policies, guidelines, and educational materials that govern content and conduct across Tik Tok. Your team's mission is to develop nuanced, principled, and operationally viable policies addressing a wide spectrum of complex issue areas, from user safety to content integrity and platform abuse.

As the Head of Global Policy Development, you will be a key organizer, influencer, and subject matter expert, guiding your team to strike the right balance between mitigating harm and enabling expression. You will provide strategic leadership across the company, championing user safety and well-being, particularly for vulnerable groups, and ensuring our policies are globally consistent yet locally relevant.

Key Responsibilities:

• Policy Development: Lead the global team through the entire policy lifecycle, defining overarching principles, frameworks, and taxonomies for core T&S issues (e.g., Child Safety, Hate Speech, Misinformation), and overseeing the creation of clear, actionable policies, guidelines, and educational materials.
• Stakeholder Management: Build strong partnerships and act as the central policy contact, collaborating closely with internal teams (Product, Engineering, Operations, Legal, Comms, etc.) to ensure policies are effective, feasible, and aligned with objectives, while effectively communicating rationale to all stakeholders, including leadership.
• Crisis Management: Serve as the global escalation point for complex, high-profile, or emergency content safety issues, providing expert guidance and facilitating rapid, principled decision-making under pressure, balancing safety, expression, legal risk, and public perception.
• Proactive Adaptation: Support transparency initiatives, engage with external experts and organizations, and stay abreast of global trends, emerging harms, platform risks, and relevant regulatory landscapes to proactively adapt policies.
• Team Leadership: Foster a high-performing, collaborative, and inclusive team culture, manage cross-team relations effectively, and continuously seek opportunities to optimize policy development, iteration, and implementation processes for greater efficiency and quality.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• 5+ years leading high-performing, global teams and a proven track record developing/implementing global policy frameworks at scale.
• Deep understanding of the Trust & Safety ecosystem, major policy challenges (e.g., child safety, misinformation, hate speech), and experience navigating complex global legal, regulatory, and cultural nuances.
• Demonstrated ability to build consensus and collaborate effectively with diverse cross-functional partners (ie: Legal, Product, Engineering, Operations, Communications); experience working directly with product and engineering teams to translate policy requirements into technical solutions.
• Exceptional analytical, problem-solving, with the ability to articulate complex policy concepts persuasively to diverse audiences and leverage data for decision-making.
• Proven ability to manage high-stakes escalations, make sound, principled judgments and balance competing priorities (ie: safety, expression, risk).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Demonstrated ability to influence executive leadership and shape global strategy through compelling policy recommendations.
• Ability to thrive in a highly complex and matrix global organization.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $182,000 - $420,000 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate's qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

Additional Information

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.