Principal, Policy Development

About the role

You define and safeguard policy across Trust & Safety for GoFundMe, owning the full lifecycle from evidence review to implementation and continuous improvement. You translate enforcement data, calibration disagreement, and external signals into clear policy options and concrete product or guidance changes. You write precise, enforceable policies and detection criteria that reviewers can apply consistently and users can understand, while coordinating with automation, detection, and machine learning partners. You review sensitive material as part of the role and communicate tradeoffs to executives, Legal, Product, and Operations.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Conduct risk assessments using enforcement and appeal data, calibration disagreement, and external policy landscape to identify gaps in fraud and identity risk, content moderation, campaign integrity, prohibited fundraising, and platform abuse.
• Translate identified gaps into specific fixes, selecting among new policy, revision, guidance, or product change matched to the underlying problem.
• Define terms, thresholds, and decision criteria for both reviewers and automated systems, and write policies that state what is required and why at the policy level, and how at the enforcement level.
• Map violation types to concrete actions such as content removal, fund holds, disbursement restrictions, and account actions, ensuring alignment across enforcement workflows.
• Own policy coherence across the policy corpus and resolve contradictory outcomes by collaborating with subject matter experts at the framework level.
• Operationalize policy within GoFundMe's architecture by specifying definitions, thresholds, decision logic, and the order of operations for reviewers and automated systems.
• Manage the end-to-end policy lifecycle, including success criteria design, post-launch monitoring, and iterative refinement based on observed outcomes.
• Write policy proposals that frame questions, options, tradeoffs, and recommendations for executives and other stakeholders.
• Calibrate policy thresholds with operations teams to distinguish policy judgment decisions from independent operations decisions.
• Own the substance of appeals by setting decision criteria, defensibility standards, and a feedback loop that revises policy based on appeal outcomes.
• Act as the primary policy point of contact for automation, detection, and machine learning partners, translating policy intent into detection requirements and evaluation criteria.
• Review sensitive material including disturbing images, videos, text, offensive language, violence, exploitation, or self-injury as part of policy evaluation and calibration.

Requirements

• Bring 8+ years of policy experience with substantial ownership in fraud, identity, or transactional risk, demonstrating end-to-end responsibility for policy development and implementation.
• Show a track record of authoring or substantially revising policies that were implemented at scale, managing the full lifecycle from problem identification through post-launch monitoring.
• Demonstrate experience operationalizing policy and calibrating application across teams, including writing enforcement guidelines, reviewer training materials, and escalation criteria.
• Write policies that reviewers can apply consistently and users can understand, and ensure these policies hold up when quoted in external contexts.
• Communicate policy tradeoffs clearly to Legal and Communications, scope decisions to Product, and enforcement changes to Operations.

Nice to have

• Experience in content policy development, particularly in areas related to fraud, identity, and transactional risk.
• Experience at a fundraising, donations, crowdfunding, or nonprofit-adjacent platform where policy directly affects user outcomes.
• Experience translating policy into detection requirements for automated systems and using enforcement, appeal, and accuracy data to evaluate policy effectiveness.

Engineering methods

• Apply structured methods and tools to analyze risk, define policy logic, and validate enforcement behavior.

Relevant systems

• GoFundMe
• Metaview

Practical notes

• The role may involve reviewing sensitive material including disturbing images, videos, text, offensive language, violence, exploitation, or self-injury.
• Compensation is an annual U.S. salary range of $133,000 - $200,000, with company-provided benefits that may include healthcare, dental, vision, life insurance, and a 401(k).
• Geolocation differentials may adjust pay based on work location, and pay may vary by skills, experience, education, or training.
• For roles based in New York City or remote positions associated with the NYC office, Metaview is used as an automated employment decision tool under NYC Local Law 144.

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