The sideways move into Trust & Safety

The likeliest way into Trust & Safety (the team that protects a company's users from scams, abuse and other harm) usually isn't a job application. It's switching teams at the company you already work for.

Here's why it works. The hardest part of getting hired is getting a stranger to pay attention to you, and inside your own company that part is already done. Your manager can vouch for you. The Trust & Safety lead has seen your name on tricky cases. Everyone who has to approve the move is taking a smaller risk, and people who approve things love a smaller risk.

This guide is for people who already work close to it: in support, fraud, legal, compliance, data, communications or engineering, at a company that has a Trust & Safety team or badly needs one.

Where you are now, and the closest team

Here are the common switches, using the job board's own categories for the team you'd land on:

• Customer support moves closest to T&S Operations, or Appeals & Escalations. First step across: own the handoff when support passes a case to safety.
• Fraud or payments moves closest to Fraud & Payments Risk, or Platform Integrity. Follow one scam past the payment and into how the account behaves.
• Legal or compliance moves closest to Policy & Standards, or Compliance. Write the guidance on applying the rules that people keep asking you for.
• Data or analytics moves closest to Data & Analytics for T&S. Build the dashboard the safety team keeps asking for.
• Communications or PR moves closest to Crisis Management. Join the review meeting after the next big incident.
• Engineering moves closest to Engineering, AI & Automation. Fix the bug in the reviewers' tools that everyone has learned to live with.

Notice it's the same move every time. Find the bit of Trust & Safety work that already spills into your job, and do it well enough that the other team starts asking for you by name.

What one switch looked like, month by month

Take someone in support at a mid-size marketplace. Here's how her move went:

• Month 1: she took the shift nobody wanted, passing the hardest reports to the safety team.
• Month 3: she wrote a one-page guide for that shift (what goes to safety, what doesn't, and why) and sent it to both team leads.
• Month 5: the safety team started using it, and asked her to sit in on their weekly meeting where reviewers compare decisions. Unpaid.
• Month 8: she covered the safety team's work for two weeks during an outage, and kept the guide up to date the whole time.
• Month 10: a job opened on the safety team. The lead asked her to apply before it was even posted.

No new degree, no outside application, and no new title until the very end. She built the move out of borrowed work, written down, over ten months.

Making yourself easy to move

• Tell your manager early, and pitch it as growing inside the company. A manager who hears about it secondhand can quietly block a move they would have backed.
• Learn a few words before the interview. Policy means the written rules for what's allowed. Enforcement is acting on them. Calibration is reviewers comparing calls so they decide the same way. Precision and recall measure how often the calls are right and how much gets missed. The Starter Kit covers it in an afternoon.
• Keep proof in writing: the guide you wrote, the hard cases you took, the pattern you spotted. An internal interview panel reads it the same way an outside one would.
• Ask the Trust & Safety lead for twenty minutes, and ask what the team is drowning in. Then go help with some of it.
• Check your company's transfer rules. Most want a year in your current job and your manager's sign-off, so time your ask to fit them.

If there's no team to move to

At a company with no Trust & Safety team, the sideways move is becoming the reason one gets started. Somebody already deals with the abuse reports, the scary emails and the letter from a government regulator. It's usually support or legal, and it's usually nobody's actual job. (Everyone just hopes someone else opened the letter.)

So write the first document on how the rules get applied. Suggest how reports should come in. Growing companies and new laws always force a team into existence eventually, and when that happens, the person who was already doing the work carefully has the best claim to it.

That's really the whole trick. A transfer is a pile of borrowed work, written down, waiting for someone to give it a job title.