Trust & Safety Coffee Chats

Trust & Safety Coffee Chats are one-on-one conversations designed to provide mentorship to current and aspiring trust and safety professionals. Hosts are volunteering their time and expertise to offer advice to job seekers and T&S professionals.

How It Works:

• Search for a host based on what you want to talk about.
• Sign-up using the host’s “Schedule a chat” button.
• Come prepared with questions and have a specific goal in mind.

Friendly Reminders:

• Be respectful of our hosts and their time. If you book time with a host, please show up or cancel the booking in advance if the time no longer works for you.
• The TSPA Code of Conduct applies to all resources, spaces, and programming, even if you’re not a TSPA member.
• If you’re just getting started in T&S and want to learn more, we recommend reviewing Careers in T&S and the T&S Curriculum before scheduling.
• Hosts are not conducting formal interviews, offering referrals, providing product feedback, participating in interviews and/or user research, and/or acting on behalf of their employers or TSPA. If you schedule time and you’re not a current or aspiring T&S professional, a host reserves the right to cancel the appointment without notice.
• Double check the time zone when booking. Our hosts are located all over the globe.

If you’re a TSPA member looking for a way to help other folks on their journey in T&S, sign up to be a T&S Coffee Hours host!

Being new to T&S Being recently laid off BIPOC in T&S Compliance Cross-functional collaborations in T&S Data science Doing T&S at a start-up External engagement in T&S Growing in my T&S career Informational interview Interviewing tips Managing a T&S team Negotiating compensation Policy in T&S Privacy tune-up Product in T&S Research in T&S Resume review Role specific guidance T&S ecosystems T&S for infrastructure T&S for marginalized groups T&S in APAC T&S in EMEA T&S strategy Transitioning from academia to T&S Transitioning from government to T&S Transitioning from Healthcare to T&S Transitioning from NGO to T&S Transitioning my career

Analytics & Data Science Communications Engineering Legal & Law Enforcement Non-Profit Operations Policy Product Public Policy Research

Mark Reitblatt

he/him

Software Engineering Manager, Meta

Mark is a software engineering manager with seven years of … Read more professional experience (five as an Individual Contributor), joining Facebook (now Meta) directly after completing a PhD in Computer Science at Cornell. Before his PhD, he worked brief stints at a number of companies, including doing pre-silicon verification at Intel. Mark has been working in the Integrity org at Meta since 2018. In that time, he’s been primarily working on Crisis Response process, programs, and tooling. In the course of responding to crises, he’s had the opportunity to touch almost every aspect of Trust and Safety, ranging from policy, operations, product management, scaled review, measurement, ML and automation, to internal tooling and infrastructure. As a general rule, if it can break and cause an issue in a crisis, he’s probably had to deep dive and fire fight on it. Mark is mainly looking to host other engineers or engineering managers interested in or working in the T&S space, but happy to talk to anyone. He’s currently working remotely out of Seattle, but was previously in the SF Bay Area for several years. Read less

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Matt Ramirez

he/him

Content Policy Liaison, Meta

Hi friends! Matt has spent much of his career working … Read more in electoral politics, capping his public service experience off as an advisor to Speaker Pelosi. He’s worn a number of hats under policy, communications, strategy, and coalition management. While on Capitol Hill, Matt served as Vice President to the LGBTQ Staff Association, where he worked to hire over 100 staffers to various offices via interview prep, resume review, and other professional development resources. Now, he works with Meta’s content policy organization on transparency and policy development. He lives in San Francisco and has two formal years of trust and safety experience, and nine years of formal political experience. Read less

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Matthew Soeth

he/him

Executive Director, Thriving in Games Group (TIGG)

Matthew Soeth is the Executive Director of the Thriving in … Read more Games Group, a global nonprofit supporting video game development and fostering safe online spaces. With a background in business development for tech startups and large platforms, including serving on TikTok’s Global Trust & Safety Team, and head of trust and Safety at Spectrum Labs, he has extensive experience in creator support, and brand safety. He also co-founded the Social Media Helpline, the first U.S. support service for schools addressing social media challenges. A former educator with 15 years of experience, Matt developed policies and resources for online safety in schools and continues to advise nonprofits like the Aaron Judge ALL RISE Foundation. Read less

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Michael Swenson

he/they

Safety Policy Manager, Safety & Wellbeing, Meta

Michael Swenson most recently led the Policy Programs team at … Read more Discord, where they oversee a variety of programs that facilitate direct connections between Discord’s many safety and policy-focused teams with users, moderators, academics, and industry practitioners. Their team engaged in dialogue, research, and education surrounding topics of platform governance, policy acumen and praxis, as well as education and co-creative approaches to facing the platform’s toughest safety challenges. In their prior work, Michael worked in the digital marketing space and in academia, and also has spent many years in online community spaces, helping lead dozens of communities most recently on the Reddit platform. They studied religion and ethics in modern society at Duke University, where they researched religious and political extremism through the lens of post-colonial era critical social theory and anthropological approaches to communities of practice. They also spent several years doing Computer Science work at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where they focused on human-centered design, ethics in AI and ML, and educational technology at scale. Read less

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Nikhil Teggi

Partner, Saachi Legal

I'm a tech and privacy lawyer with 10+ years of … Read more experience advising on trust and safety (primarily online terms, content, and T&S policies), emerging tech, and data privacy. My work involves providing strategic counsel on legal, policy, risk management, regulatory compliance, and governance issues relating to tech products and services. I have advised hundreds of tech startups and thousands of founders, worked closely with senior management, led cross-functional teams for clients, and provided transactional advisory for large multi-country technology contracts. At present I’m the founding partner at Saachi Legal, a tech legal firm based in Bengaluru, India. With specific reference to T&S roles and activities, several of my clients have been tech startups / platforms with varying user base in domains including social media, fintech, edtech, and health tech. I have worked with, advised, and trained internal teams at these organisations drafting and reviewing policies on content, acceptable user behaviour, data, privacy, etc. In addition, I have a deep interest in emerging tech, data, AI, and cybersecurity, and keen desire to understand the matters I provide advise on. Consequently, I hold a variety of technical and other certifications including on AI, AI governance, and privacy. I’m also presently a mentor with All Tech is Human, for data privacy and tech policy, and would love to mentor TSPA members as best I can. Read less

TSPA Members Only

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Nitesh Shivapooja

he/him

Manager, Google Cloud Trust & Safety, Google

Nitesh has been in the Trust & Safety space for … Read more over 10 years, all at Google. He has had the opportunity to work as an IC and manager, and has built teams from the ground up. Nitesh has also developed and executed anti-abuse strategies for various categories of products including Search, G+, Google Drive, Calendar, and others. His team also works on identifying various abuses ranging from Chia mining on Cloud, scaled abuse like spammy notifications/emails and sensitive and egregious content like terrorist content, sexually explicit content, and hate speech. Read less

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Nivedita Mishra

she/her

Partner Manager, Meta

Nivedita has expertise in: Internet Trust and Safety, Content Moderation, … Read more Operations, Mentoring, Team Management, Vendor Management, Project Management. She has more than 15 years experience in the tech industry with 12+ years at Meta across different T&S Operations teams, almost two years at Deloitte on business analysis and content management, and almost one year and two months at Magna Infotech on content management. Nivedita is located in Hyderabad, India (India Standard Time). Read less

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Paola Maggiorotto

she/her

Trust & Safety Process Director, Teleperformance

Paola Maggiorotto currently works at Teleperformance as T&S Process Director, … Read more and is based out of Medellin, Colombia. Originally from Italy, she spent 12 years in Dublin, Ireland. Her last job there was at Meta as T&S Global Process Manager (specialized in violent, graphic and very egregious content), leading a team of Project and Program Managers, scaling solutions helping prevent online and real-world harm by building fast, scalable support systems and optimizing processes, to address safety-related incidents on Facebook and Instagram products, reducing risk and by influencing others to collaborate on cross-functional initiatives. Prior to that, Paola worked at Microsoft as EMEA Technical Support Manager and Search Editorial Specialist ensuring a high-quality and safe user experience on Microsoft Advertising and partner sites. She has 10 years of experience in T&S, through people, project and program management, stakeholder engagement, operations and communication. Paola is also super passionate about DEI and human rights and have been involved in leading multiple DEI and ERG global initiatives, focusing on guaranteeing a gender and culturally balanced recruiting pipeline/workforce and advocating for more inclusion of women and underrepresented categories in technology and the corporate world. Read less

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Paul Janzer

he/him

,

In 2005, Paul was hired as Facebook’s first customer support … Read more rep. Beyond providing support to a rapidly growing user base, he was also asked to help build out the team (hiring, management, etc.) and establish operations strategy (workflows, policies, tooling, goals, etc.). By 2007, Paul was responsible for the entire Bay Area User Operations team (~80 people), and, shortly thereafter, supported an expansion to three other offices as part of the global leadership team. When he left UO in 2011, it had grown to over 250 employees. Paul spent much of his time in Facebook UO focused on Trust & Safety, leading teams that were responsible for issues such as spam, account integrity, authenticity, pornography, hate speech, and harassment. He worked with these groups to establish content policies, continuously improve workflows/tooling, and evolving models to be more proactive. After leaving UO, Paul transitioned to Product Management. He worked for four years as a PM on Facebook Growth and four years as a Product Lead at Airbnb. In these roles, he interfaced regularly with T&S teams to ensure products prioritized user safety and wellbeing. Since mid 2020, Paul has been taking time off to be with his family and work on some of his own projects. He’d love to be of help to people who are still on the front lines, tackling difficult T&S issues across the industry. Paul is located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read less

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Ratnakar Pawar

He/Him

Staff Machine Learning Engineer, PlayStation

Ratnakar Pawar is a Staff Machine learning Engineer at PlayStation, … Read more

where he leads Trust and Safety AI initiatives, building scalable, multilingual AI solutions to detect complex harms such as hate speech, bullying, and child grooming across text, image, and voice communications.

With a decade of experience in applied machine learning, his work also focuses on architecting novel generative AI systems and robust fairness evaluation pipelines to enhance platform integrity and support human moderators. His contributions to the field include patented threat intelligence technologies from his time at IBM and a commitment to advancing industry practices through open-source initiatives.

As a member of TSPA and a Coffee Chats host, Ratnakar is looking forward to discussing career paths in ML safety, the challenges of scaling multimodal abuse detection, implementing responsible AI, and leveraging new technologies to build a safer internet for everyone.

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Rolando Vega

he/him

Sr. Manager, Legal Response, Discord

Rolando currently leads the Legal Response Team at Discord. He … Read more has eight plus years of experience working in Trust & Safety and his career has focused on legal compliance in relation to law enforcement, child safety, intellectual property, and privacy operations. He has worked to develop processes and teams at companies like Pinterest, TikTok, Snap, and Twitter. His previous background in legal support has aided him in developing a career in Trust & Safety legal operations, and his passion for preventing real-world harm has allowed him to continue to grow as a leader in this space. Read less

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Rosanna Rafel-Rix

she/her

Program Manager, YouTube Trust and Safety, Google

Rosanna has been at YouTube for over two years, and … Read more is a Program Manager for YouTube Trust and Safety, having formerly been Policy Enforcement Manager tackling Hate Speech for YouTube. She held a series of roles in the third sector prior to joining YouTube, working on antisemitism and racism, particularly online for almost a decade. She currently works cross-policy with external organizations, managing the Trusted Flagger program for YouTube. She has a Masters in Criminology, focused on Hate Speech, from Birkbeck College, University of London and a Masters in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies. She is based in London. Read less

TSPA Members Only

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