Community Support Lead: Trust & Safety

ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY

Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission to deliver a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Our proven learning platform offers free, high-quality supplemental learning content and practice that cover Pre-K - 12th grade and early college core academic subjects, focusing on math and science. We have over 155 million registered learners globally and are committed to improving learning outcomes for students worldwide, focusing on learners in historically under-resourced communities.

OUR COMMUNITY 

Our students, teachers, and parents come from all walks of life, and so do we. Our team includes people from academia, traditional/non-traditional education, big tech companies, and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences because it makes our company stronger. We value diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as necessary to achieve our mission and impact the communities we serve. We know that transforming education starts in-house with learning about ourselves and our colleagues. We strive to be world-class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional.

THE ROLE

Khan Academy is looking for an experienced online safety professional to join our scrappy Community Support team. Our team is committed to providing a safe and healthy environment for our learner community, and is deeply integrated into our product teams and processes across the organization. We work closely with product management, engineering, legal, design, marketing, quality assurance, and many others to make sure that the needs of our community are being met.  

The Community Support Lead: Trust & Safety position is a new role on our team that we’re very excited about. The initial area of responsibility for this role will be helping set safety policy and processes around feature development and content moderation for our new AI tutor, Khanmigo. This is a new and rapidly changing space and we want to make sure that the safety needs of our learners, teachers, and parents are being proactively considered across projects.

Additionally, this person will use their skills and experience to help lead community safety improvements more broadly. Khan Academy has a wonderful and supportive community across many channels and we want to make sure that they always feel safe learning and asking questions. Because of the age, diversity, and scope of our learner community and their interactions, this is a complex challenge that we need a seasoned safety leader to help us address.

You won’t be working directly in the support queue often, but as a leader on the support team you will help mentor and coach those who are, and help with relevant escalations. You’ll also eventually be embedded on one or more product teams to help drive safety and learner-related feature improvements. This is a rare opportunity for an experienced trust and safety leader to drive solutions to novel AI safety challenges, while at the same time having a real impact on global education access. 

Responsibilities

• Analyze and improve our Khanmigo moderation processes. We have solid initial processes but want to set these up to scale to the complex needs of this feature. This will include creating policies and documentation, training and coaching for the moderation team, and ongoing audits and reporting.

• Identify and advocate for tool and product needs around community safety across the organization.

• Represent the user safety point of view in new feature development processes. This means understanding how safety needs cut across product areas and cohorts, and collaborating with relevant teams. This will include the product teams responsible for our district, teacher, parent, learner, and platform experiences.

• Dive deep into our comment moderation tools (separate from Khanmigo) and put together processes for ensuring strong safety coverage of discussions, given current resources. Work with our community moderators to make sure we’re applying best practices around user safety.

• Work closely with our legal and security teams and standardize the Community Support team’s policies around sensitive and higher-risk escalations.

• Audit our customer support processes for potential social engineering vulnerabilities, and train the support team on how to avoid potential bad actors.

• As a leader on the Community Support team, regularly help with teamwide customer support projects and needs outside of your main focus, including answering tickets, improving help articles, and other product support tasks.

Qualifications

• 4+ years professional trust and safety experience, preferably in a leadership role. You keep updated on the latest industry best practices, and have handled a wide variety of problematic online behavior.

• 1+ years experience working closely with product teams, directly influencing feature development.

• Experience operating a content moderation program or team, ideally one that contained content from younger users.

• Expertise with relevant laws and trends in the online trust and safety space, and ability to make high stakes decisions with consideration for compliance and legal requirements.

• Ability to analyze and draw conclusions from both qualitative and quantitative sources.

• Excellent written communication, which you can adapt for a variety of online audiences.

• A history of successfully managing and executing projects of medium-to-large complexity. You’re able to balance a number of simultaneous goals and responsibilities within the timeline you’ve set for yourself.

• Comfort working both autonomously and within defined structure. You’ll be joining a small team and your role will have many opportunities for you to leave your personal mark on it, but we are also a high-performing department with established processes around many topics.

• Excited to build relationships with team members in other departments, and embrace a cross-functional mindset. 

• You don’t take yourself too seriously and are excited to join a quirky, effective Community Support team.

Nice to have

• Experience setting safety policies for communities that include children.

• Familiarity with the user risks around AI, and good working knowledge around how LLMs and prompt engineering work.

• Experience with managing trust and safety efforts across multiple languages and cultures.

• Fraud detection and prevention experience.

• Edtech, classroom, and/or teaching experience.

• An appreciation for the complexity of managing online communities (beyond trust + safety) and all of their idiosyncrasies.

• Professional experience in technical support, community management, or product management.

• Strong fluency in memes, internet trends, gifs, and/or dad jokes.

PERKS AND BENEFITS

We may be a non-profit, but we reward our talented team extremely well! We offer:

• Competitive salaries

• Ample paid time off as needed – Your well-being is a priority.

• Remote-first culture - that caters to your time zone, with open flexibility as needed, at times

• Generous parental leave

• An exceptional team that trusts you and gives you the freedom to do your best

• The chance to put your talents towards a deeply meaningful mission and the opportunity to work on high-impact products that are already defining the future of education

• Opportunities to connect through affinity, ally, and social groups

• And we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) + 4% matching & comprehensive insurance, including medical, dental, vision, and life

At Khan Academy we are committed to fair and equitable compensation practices, the well-being of our employees, and our Khan community. This belief is why we have built out a robust Total Rewards package that includes competitive base salaries, and extensive benefits and perks to support physical, mental, and financial well-being.

The target salary range for this position is $100,000 - $110,000 USD. The pay range for this position is a general guideline only. The salary offered will depend on internal pay equity and the candidate’s relevant skills, experience, qualifications, and job market data. Exceptional performers in this role who make an outsized contribution can make well in excess of this range.  Additional incentives are provided as part of the complete total rewards package in addition to comprehensive medical and other benefits.

MORE ABOUT US

• Sal’s TED talk from 2011

• Sal’s TED talk from 2015

• Sal's TED talk from 2023

• Our team:  http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team

OUR COMPANY VALUES

Live & breathe learners

We deeply understand and empathize with our users. We leverage user insights, research, and experience to build content, products, services, and experiences that our users trust and love. Our success is defined by the success of our learners and educators.

Take a stand

As a company, we have conviction in our aspirational point of view of how education will evolve. The work we do is in service to moving towards that point of view. However, we also listen, learn and flex in the face of new data, and commit to evolving this point of view as the industry and our users evolve.

Embrace diverse perspectives

We are a diverse community. We seek out and embrace a diversity of voices, perspectives and life experiences leading to stronger, more inclusive teams and better outcomes. As individuals, we are committed to bringing up tough topics and leaning into different points of view with curiosity. We actively listen, learn and collaborate to gain a shared understanding. When a decision is made, we commit to moving forward as a united team.

Work responsibly and sustainably

We understand that achieving our audacious mission is a marathon, so we set realistic timelines and we focus on delivery that also links to the bigger picture. As a non-profit, we are supported by the generosity of donors as well as strategic partners, and understand our responsibility to our finite resources. We spend every dollar as though it were our own. We are responsible for the impact we have on the world and to each other. We ensure our team and company stay healthy and financially sustainable.

Bring out the joy

We are committed to making learning a joyful process. This informs what we build for our users and the culture we co-create with our teammates, partners and donors.

Cultivate learning mindset

We believe in the power of growth for learners and for ourselves. We constantly learn and teach to improve our offerings, ourselves, and our organization. We learn from our mistakes and aren’t afraid to fail. We don't let past failures or successes stop us from taking future bold action and achieving our goals.

Deliver wow

We insist on high standards and deliver delightful, effective end-to-end experiences that our users can rely on. We choose to focus on fewer things — each of which aligns to our ambitious vision — so we can deliver high-quality experiences that accelerate positive measurable learning with our strategic partners.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we encourage candidates from historically underrepresented groups to apply.