How to Pivot Into Trust & Safety in 2026: A Community Coffee Chat
If you are trying to break into Trust & Safety right now, you have probably hit the same wall a lot of people describe. The job posts ask for SQL, Python, and years of prior experience, and you are sitting there with a background in customer support, social work, law, the military, or something else entirely, wondering whether there is even a door for you.
The field does not need more identical résumés. It needs different backgrounds. A lot of safe technology gets built by former clinicians, investigators, teachers, lawyers, and frontline support people, not only engineers. And many of those "required" technical skills are not really what the daily job is about.
So grab a coffee and come hang out with us. This is a community chat, not a webinar and not a sales pitch. Leslie Taylor has spent more than a decade in Trust & Safety, moving from family therapy and NCMEC's CyberTipline into T&S roles at Snap and Adobe, and now leading AI operations for Trust & Safety at a company of 130,000 people. She will share what she has seen about how people get in, and we want to open it up so we can learn from each other too.
What we will talk about together:
Some simple ideas that have helped people make this pivot, starting with three questions worth sitting with: what are you actually good at, how do you describe that experience in Trust & Safety language, and how do you show it before anyone has given you the title.
We will also swap notes on where people are finding their way in, including customer experience, law enforcement and military backgrounds, public sector and legal work, and more. We will talk about the mindsets that seem to matter most, like an investigative eye, staying calm under pressure, and getting comfortable with policy enforcement, and why those often count for more than the long technical checklist. And we will share small, doable ways to get noticed with no T&S title yet, such as writing, volunteering, expert contributor gigs, experimenting with AI tools, and reaching out to shadow people already in the work.
Then we will spend real time on your questions, because that is the whole point.
Who this is for:
Career changers curious about Trust & Safety, people early in their journey trying to land a first role, and folks already in the field thinking about their next move as AI changes the work. If you are new to all of this, you are especially welcome here.
How it will run:
One hour, camera optional, come as you are. We will share stories and ideas, invite you to jump into the chat, and leave plenty of room for open community Q&A. Bring a question and your current job title. This works best when it is a real conversation.