Principal, Policy Development

About this role

Want to help us help others? We’re hiring!

GoFundMe is the world’s most powerful community for good, dedicated to helping people help each other. By uniting individuals and nonprofits in one place, GoFundMe makes it easy and safe for people to ask for help and support causes—for themselves and each other. Together, our community has raised more than $40 billion since 2010.

GoFundMe’s Trust & Safety team protects the integrity of the world’s largest social fundraising platform. We build and enforce the policies that govern what can and cannot happen on our platform, spanning content moderation, campaign integrity, fraud, and identity verification. Our policy work touches millions of campaigns and the communities that rally around them.

Join Us! GoFundMe's policies set the rules of the road for the organizers who ask for help, the donors who give it, and the people the money is meant to help. We are looking for a Principal, Policy Development to write clear, enforceable policy and drive its implementation, with broad ownership wherever money, identity, content, or conduct between people is at stake. Fraud, identity and transactional risk policy is the foundation of this role.

This is a senior individual contributor role reporting to the Senior Director of Policy.

The Policy team at GoFundMe is small and high-impact. We operate at the intersection of strategy and execution, which means you will be thinking about the long-term policy architecture and also writing the reviewer guidance that may go live in the next week. We value clear thinking, direct communication, and a bias toward getting things done rather than getting them perfect on the first pass. Policies are living documents, and we iterate based on data, feedback, and what we learn from enforcement.

You will partner across Trust & Safety and with Legal, Product, Engineering, and Go To Market. This role carries significant autonomy and influence, and you will shape the policies that govern the platform.

The Job

Policy Development

• Draft and revise policies and guidelines across GoFundMe’s Trust & Safety policy areas, including fraud and identity risk, content moderation, campaign integrity, prohibited fundraising, and platform abuse.

• Identify where policy is failing or missing, drawing on enforcement and appeal data, calibration disagreement, and the external landscape. Match the fix to the problem, whether that is a new policy, a revision, clearer guidance, or a product change, and make that case to the team that owns it.

• Define clear terms, thresholds, and decision criteria that reviewers and automated systems can apply consistently. Write policies that answer “what” and “why” at the policy level, and “how” at the enforcement level, without bleeding the two together.

• Influence what conduct warrants what consequence. Map violation types to specific actions, distinguishing between content-level, account-level, and payments-level consequences such as content removal, fund holds, disbursement restrictions, and account actions.

Policy Architecture and Standards

• Own coherence across the policy corpus. Find where two policies produce contradictory outcomes on the same facts and collaborate with subject matter experts to resolve the conflict at the framework level rather than patching each policy separately.

• Work within GoFundMe’s established policy architecture and extend it: the definitions and thresholds, and the decision logic and order of operations that reviewers and automated systems apply. Apply and extend the substantive standard for what counts as sound, enforceable policy.

• Own the policy lifecycle end to end, including the criteria by which policy performance is measured.

• Write the policy proposals that get decisions made. Frame the question, the options, the tradeoffs, and the recommendation at the altitude the audience needs, including for executive review

Calibration and Operationalization

• Own policy calibration with the operations teams, and use what calibration, escalations, and appeals surface to evaluate and revise policy.

• Set and maintain the threshold for what requires policy judgment versus what the operations teams decide independently.

• Own the policy substance of appeals: the decision criteria applied, the standard for what makes an outcome defensible when challenged, and the loop that turns appeal and overturn data back into policy revision.

• Act as the primary policy point of contact for automation, detection, and ML partners. Translate policy criteria into detection requirements and hold the line on what the policy actually requires.

This position may involve reviewing sensitive material, which can include disturbing images, videos, or text, as well as offensive language and other challenging content (e.g., violence, exploitation, or self-injury).

You

• 8+ years of policy experience, including substantial ownership of policy in fraud, identity, or transactional risk. You know where regulation has already dictated the policy and where the choice is genuinely open. You write for the space where it is open, aligning to company values.

• You have authored or substantially revised policies that were implemented at scale, managed the full lifecycle from problem identification through post-launch monitoring, and know what it takes to move a working document into a live enforcement workflow.

• You have experience operationalizing policy and calibrating its application across teams, including writing enforcement guidelines, reviewer training materials, and escalation criteria. You understand the gap between what the policy says and what actually happens in the queues, and you would rather fix the guidance than adjudicate the same case twice.

• You can write a policy that a reviewer applies consistently and a user understands, and that holds up when it is quoted back to you.

• You can explain a policy tradeoff to Legal and Comms, a scope decision to Product, and an enforcem

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