Trust & Safety Specialist — 6-Month Contract

About the Role

Handshake is seeking a Trust & Safety Specialist for a 6-month contract role. In this position, you will help protect the integrity of the Handshake platform by reviewing user activity, investigating reports, enforcing policies, and identifying risks that may affect our users or marketplace. Our Trust & Safety team plays a critical role in maintaining a safe, reliable, and high-quality experience for students, employers, universities, and other users across the platform.

The ideal candidate is detail-oriented, analytical, comfortable making judgment-based decisions, and committed to creating a safe and trustworthy online environment. You will work cross-functionally with teams such as Customer Support, Product, Legal, Security, and Operations to address safety concerns and improve enforcement processes.

Responsibilities

• Review and investigate reports of suspicious, abusive, fraudulent, or policy-violating activity across the Handshake platform.
• Evaluate user accounts, employer profiles, job postings, messages, and other platform activity for potential trust and safety risks.
• Enforce Handshake’s community guidelines, acceptable use policies, and marketplace standards accurately and consistently.
• Identify patterns of abuse, fraud, spam, scams, impersonation, or other harmful behavior.
• Document investigations clearly, including evidence reviewed, actions taken, and rationale for decisions.
• Respond to escalations from internal teams and provide timely, thoughtful case resolution.
• Support queue-based moderation and investigation workflows while meeting quality and productivity expectations.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to improve detection, escalation, and enforcement processes.
• Provide feedback on policy gaps, emerging risks, tooling needs, and operational improvements.
• Maintain user privacy, confidentiality, and sound judgment when handling sensitive information.

Qualifications

• 1–3+ years of experience in Trust & Safety, content moderation, fraud investigation, risk operations, marketplace integrity, customer support, or a related field.
• Strong judgment and ability to apply policies consistently to nuanced situations.
• Excellent attention to detail and comfort reviewing high volumes of information.
• Clear written communication skills, including the ability to document decisions and explain complex issues concisely.
• Experience working with internal tools, ticketing systems, CRM platforms, or moderation queues.
• Ability to manage competing priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Comfort handling sensitive, potentially distressing, or ambiguous content. High integrity, discretion, and respect for user privacy.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working on a two-sided marketplace, career platform, social platform, SaaS product, or online community.
• Familiarity with common online abuse patterns, including phishing, scams, spam, fake accounts, impersonation, and social engineering.
• Experience supporting policy enforcement, account review, fraud detection, or abuse investigations.
• Comfort using data, internal signals, and investigative reasoning to assess risk.
• Prior experience working with cross-functional partners such as Product, Legal, Security, or Support.

Success in This Role Looks Like

• You make accurate, consistent, and well-documented enforcement decisions.
• You help reduce harmful activity and improve user trust across the platform.
• You identify repeat abuse patterns and escalate meaningful trends.
• You communicate clearly with internal partners and contribute to operational improvements.
• You balance speed, quality, empathy, and sound judgment in daily casework.

Contract DetailsThis is a 6-month contract position. The role may include queue-based review work, investigations, escalations, documentation, and collaboration with internal teams. Contract extension or conversion is not guaranteed and will depend on business needs and performance.

Equal OpportunityHandshake is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and encourage candidates from underrepresented communities to apply.