AI Model Policy Trainer, Mental Health (Seattle)

Job Description

Job Description

About Handshake

Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career, regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today, we power 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions.

In 2025, we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data. We’ve grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month.

Why join Handshake now:

• Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel

• Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions

• Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders

• Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue

About Handshake AI

Human data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x in the next few years and continue for much longer as models take on new domains. Handshake AI supports all of the frontier AI labs, working on their most complex data at the largest scale.

About the Role

As an AI Model Policy Trainer focused on mental health, you will help evaluate how conversational AI systems respond to people discussing emotional distress, mental-health conditions, unusual beliefs, possible crises, and other sensitive experiences.

You will review conversations and model behavior against a detailed mental-health safety policy. Your work will help determine whether an AI response is empathetic, appropriately grounded, and sensitive to risk without reinforcing unsupported or potentially harmful beliefs.

This work requires an understanding of why people turn to AI for conversation, reflection, emotional support, or help during difficult moments. Strong candidates will recognize that AI can be useful and accessible while also understanding risks such as inappropriate validation, missed signs of crisis, overreliance, misleading guidance, or reinforcement of harmful beliefs.

Direct experience supporting individuals or families through mental-health or behavioral-health challenges is required. This experience may come from clinical care, social work, nursing, crisis support, professional caregiving, certified peer support, family advocacy, care navigation, or another structured human-services setting. AI or technology experience is helpful, but it does not substitute for this domain experience.

What You Will Do

• Review user conversations and AI responses involving mental health, emotional distress, crisis, unusual beliefs, paranoia, hallucinations, mania, and related experiences

• Apply detailed policy taxonomies and evaluation criteria to classify user requests and model behavior

• Evaluate both individual messages and changes in risk or certainty across longer conversations

• Distinguish between validating a person’s emotions and validating an unsupported or potentially harmful explanation

• Assess whether AI responses remain neutral and reality-based or improperly reinforce, escalate, or operationalize harmful beliefs

• Evaluate actions taken by AI systems through tools, including searches, messages, scheduling, purchases, file creation, and publication

• Write clear rationales that connect each evaluation decision to evidence from the conversation and policy

• Participate in calibration exercises and work with other trainers to improve consistency

• Identify ambiguous examples, gaps, and edge cases that may require policy clarification

• Review the work of other trainers and provide thoughtful, evidence-based feedback

• Incorporate coaching and adapt as policies, rubrics, and model capabilities evolve

• Collaborate with researchers, policy specialists, operations teams, and other subject-matter experts

• Work regularly with sensitive and potentially distressing content

Who May Be a Good Fit

Qualified candidates must have direct experience in one or more of the following areas:

• Mental health or behavioral health

• Social work or community-based services

• Nursing or patient care

• Professional caregiving

• Certified peer support

• Family advocacy or care navigation

• Crisis support or related human services

Clinical licensure is valuable but is not required. Relevant professional caregiving, advocacy, certified peer-support, or other structured human-services experience may qualify. Interest or experience in AI is helpful, but it does not replace direct experience supporting people through mental-health or behavioral-health challenges.

Desired Capabilities

• Required: direct experience supporting individuals or families through mental-health or behavioral-health challenges

• Familiarity with conversational AI tools and an interest in how people use them for emotional support

• A balanced understanding of both the potential benefits and risks of AI-mediated mental-health conversations

• Ability to interpret sensitive conversations with empathy, precision, and cultural awareness

• Ability to follow detailed policies and distinguish between closely related categories

• Strong written communication and the ability to explain decisions using specific evidence

• Sound judgment when information is incomplete, ambiguous, or context-dependent

• Openness to feedback, calibration, and evolving policy guidance

• Ability to raise questions or disagreements constructively and work toward consistent application of the policy

• Strong boundaries and the ability to engage with sensitive material professionally and sustainably

• Comfort working independently in a detail-oriented, feedback-heavy environment

Extra Credit

• Experience with structured review, case documentation, assessment, triage, quality assurance, or rubric-based evaluation

• Experience working with people experiencing crisis, psychosis, paranoia, mania, hallucinations, suicidal ideation, or severe emotional distress

• Experience as a certified peer specialist, family advocate, patient advocate, case manager, crisis counselor, social worker, nurse, caregiver, or behavioral-health professional

• Familiarity with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or other conversational AI systems

• Experience evaluating AI outputs, annotating data, applying content policies, or conducting quality reviews

• Understanding of how culture, language, disability, socioeconomic circumstances, and access to care can affect mental-health conversations

• Experience participating in case consultation, supervision, audit, or calibration processes

You Will Thrive Here If

• You are curious about AI and comfortable exploring how it may support people who need someone to talk to

• You understand why someone might choose AI because it is immediate, private, accessible, or easier to approach than another person

• You can acknowledge the potential value of AI without overlooking its limitations or risks

• You avoid diagnosing people from limited text and do not treat every mention of mental health as an emergency

• You can separate empathy for a person from agreement with their interpretation of an experience

• You rely on evidence and policy criteria rather than intuition alone

• You can change your conclusion when new context or stronger evidence becomes available

• You are comfortable discussing policy disagreements respectfully and applying the final guidance consistently

• You care about building AI systems that respond to vulnerable people with greater safety, nuance, and humanity

Location Requirement

This position is based in Seattle, Washington. Candidates must currently be located in the Seattle area or be willing to relocate to Seattle for the position.

Content Warning

This role involves regular and deliberate exposure to sensitive and potentially distressing material. You may review content involving suicide, self-harm, psychosis, paranoia, hallucinations, mania, abuse, violence, substance use, severe emotional distress, and other mental-health or crisis-related situations.

Candidates must be able to engage with this material professionally and sustainably. Support resources are available.