Senior Associate, Online Safety Policy Development

11/10/2026

Online Safety Group

Senior Associate

Fixed Term (Fixed Term)

** Please note that this role will close at 00:01 on Sunday 11 October, and therefore we advise getting your application in by no later than midnight on Saturday 10 October.

The Online Safety Group’s purpose is to ensure UK citizens have a safer life online by implementing and overseeing the requirements under the Online Safety Act 2023. The Group is responsible for delivering online safety policy, supervising online services, and building technical expertise to meet the regime’s aims.

This role is within the Online Safety Policy Development team, which works at the centre of the Online Safety Group. The Policy Development team lead the development of Ofcom’s online safety policies which establish steps services should take to make users safer online. They are policy experts in online harms, mitigations and are responsible for implementing our policy codes and guidance.

This Senior Policy Manager role will be based in the Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation (CSEA) Policy Team. The role of the child sexual abuse and exploitation team is to create bold and innovative policy that protects the public from encountering child sexual abuse and exploitation online and prevents children becoming victim to child sexual abuse and exploitation online.

Our priorities over the next year involve driving compliance with the measures to combat child sexual abuse and exploitation that are already established in our Codes of Practice, assessing the impact of the Government’s proposals to ban U-16s from social media, and implementing further legislative changes as a result of the Crime and Policing Act.

One of Ofcom’s key strategic priorities for online safety is to ensure that offenders cannot share child sexual abuse content and that children do not face unsafe contact online.

Our Senior Policy Advisors in the Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation (CSEA) Policy Team are subject matter experts that are responsible for leading key areas of policy development with the purpose of achieving this aim. They use their own expertise in this specialism to lead thinking, development, and delivery of new policy to prevent the spread of this content online and protect children from harm.

They will also be responsible for challenging existing thinking and influencing change as an expert and trusted advisor on CSEA to colleagues across the Online Safety Group, particularly our supervision and enforcement teams.

This role is a fixed-term contract for a period of 12 months.

• To apply your subject matter expertise on how child sexual exploitation and abuse manifests online to support a broad range of functions, including policy development, driving compliance and working with partners and stakeholders effectively.
• Utilise your knowledge of the CSEA threat and wider technical landscape to enable the development of effective and robust policy. This could include consideration of the specific risks associated with end-to-end encrypted services.
• Be the CSA subject matter expert to support Supervision and Enforcement teams in driving compliance with our existing CSEA measures in our Codes of Practice, with a particular focus on tackling online grooming.
• You will identify, research, and gather information and analysis about the latest trends and developments of how online child sexual abuse manifests online.
• Work with teams across the organisation to consider the implementation of the government’s under-16s social media ban and the impact of this on the CSEA threat.
• Stay abreast of changes in technological developments and how these impact the fight…