Waking Up with a Sense of Pride: Why I Joined Cinder

When meeting someone new, there are about a dozen questions I ask before arriving at the most basic of them all: “What do you do for a living?” That being said, I do love it when people ask me about my job.

Ahead of my final year of university, I applied, almost on a whim, for a product policy internship at what was then known as Facebook. Two months later, I flew out to San Francisco and, without knowing it, began my career working in Trust & Safety with Brian Fishman, who would eventually co-found Cinder.

The Trust & Safety space was not new, but it was still figuring itself out in many ways. With daily front-page exposés in leading papers, the President of the United States and politicians across the country spending more and more time talking about content moderation, integrity, and the state of social media, it felt like I was joining the right industry at the right time.

I spent the next several years of my career at Discord, working across a range of Trust & Safety areas, including operations, product, policy, and product marketing. Through the highs and lows of working in this space, and seeing some of the worst content on the internet, I woke up every day with a sense of pride in what I was doing.

The work is hard, really hard. Does catching more bad actors mean that our detection capabilities have improved? Or that there are simply more bad actors on our platform than before? Working in an inherently ambiguous environment, with no denominator that perfectly measures success, can feel impossible at times. But the mission makes it worth it.

All of this is what led me to join Cinder. Companies need cutting-edge tools and resources to combat abuse, especially in the generative AI era. At the same time, many leadership teams still view Trust & Safety as a cost center, while smaller companies simply do not have the resources to build an internal safety organization across operations, policy, legal, product, and engineering.

I joined Cinder to work with founders I have known and cheered on from the sidelines for years, and to help build AI systems that allow platforms to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated abuse.

I had also seen the kind of company they were trying to build. The culture showed up in how people worked: start with the customer’s real problem, ship and learn quickly, take responsibility for the outcome, and put the mission ahead of ego.

Those principles matter in Trust & Safety because the problems are too messy for people to hide behind process. The stakes are too high to optimize only for appearances. You have to listen closely, make decisions with imperfect information, learn from what happened, and keep improving as the threat changes.

I know what it feels like to sit in the queue. I know what it feels like when a tool makes an investigation harder than it needs to be. I know the difference between a workflow that looks good in a demo and one that survives contact with a real moderation operation.

That experience shapes the questions I bring to the product. Can a system give a reviewer the context they need? Can an agent reduce routine work while preserving the cases that require human judgment? Can a team evaluate whether the system is actually improving decisions, rather than simply producing confident-looking outputs? At Cinder, I get to work on those questions directly.

The goal is not to pretend that AI can permanently solve Trust & Safety. There is no permanent solution. Bad actors adapt. Platforms change. Policies evolve. New products create new incentives and new ways to cause harm. The job is to keep up, and to give the people doing that job better leverage. The people doing this work deserve tools designed with their reality in mind. Better tools make their jobs more sustainable. They also make the internet better for everyone else.

I’m working longer hours than I ever have, but I’m doing it in our incredible office, alongside even more incredible people. We’re all in this together, on a quest to unironically “make the world a better place” — a phrase from the HBO “documentary” Silicon Valley that was ahead of its time.

So yes, when someone asks what I do for a living, I get excited to tell them: “Do you want to see terrorism and child exploitation on your social media feed? No? You’re welcome.”

If you want the coolest job at the dinner party, join us at Cinder.