The most secure job in T&S might just be compliance
I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job.
Thanks to everyone who got in touch about our new series, Safe for Work?. This is our first instalment and we'd love your thoughts — share via LinkedIn (other platforms are available and encouraged), reply with your thoughts via email and if you like it, pass it on in your workplace Slack. Here we go! — Alice
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The T&S jobs growth story
When Ben and I started researching this series, we assumed the story would be about the decline of traditional T&S roles (we’ll touch on that in future editions). Instead, the thing that stood out for both of us was far less glamorous but far more durable: compliance.
If you're like most people in Trust & Safety, you probably didn’t get into this field because you love regulatory frameworks. But while moderation teams have been cut and AI safety funding has dried up, compliance hiring has quietly become a bigger part of the hiring pie. In many ways, it’s become the steadiest career path in T&S — and the data backs that up.
Why compliance is having its moment
As Daphne Keller wrote in The Rise of the Compliant Speech Platform, we're seeing a fundamental shift in how platforms approach content decisions. It's less about mission-driven safety work and more about meeting regulatory requirements. Companies aren't building safety features primarily because it's the right thing to do, they're building them because they'll get fined if they don't.
That might sound cynical, but this is still important work. Regulations create a floor that everyone has to meet. Compliance professionals are building the infrastructure that makes basic safety measures mandatory rather than optional. That's not nothing.
This shift is driven almost entirely by European regulation. The EU has created a regulatory ecosystem that's spawning entire departments of compliance professionals. And where Europe leads, other countries are starting to follow.
The European regulatory engine
As many of you will know, the Digital Services Act went into full enforcement in February 2024, and the EU isn't messing around. The European Commission has already hired 127 people to work on the DSA and plans to hire 60 more. They're recruiting across five different profiles: legal officers, policy specialists, operations specialists, traffic measurement experts, and technology specialists.