Associate, Online Safety Supervision

Please note that this role will close at 00:01 on Monday 28 September, and therefore we advise getting your application in by no later than midnight on Sunday 27 September.

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 sits within Ofcom’s Supervision Team. The Supervision Team provides close, structured engagement with specific services in scope of the online safety regime, alongside an approach to promoting compliance across many thousands of services. This role will consider industry practices in good governance and standards in online safety risk assessments, working closely with other specialist teams in Ofcom and the supervision team to identify improvements.

Our Supervision Associates support our engagement with some of the online services people use every day. You will be directly supervising key tech firms, building relationships so we can understand their protections for users and, where necessary, encourage them to do better. As you grow into the role, we’ll support you in building your knowledge of online safety measures and the services you supervise so that you can become an expert in protecting users from harmful and illegal content.

You will be part of a team that supervises a portfolio of key online services. You will help develop supervision strategies for each service and help report on progress against them to the broader Online Safety Group. You may be Ofcom's primary point of contact for some services, working as part of a team to ensure that all Ofcom’s engagement and requests for information meet Ofcom’s strategic aims while balancing proportionality.

Our Associates may also work with a broader range of regulated services that are not formally supervised, working with teams across Ofcom to respond to live and emerging compliance issues where we may need to intervene to help protect people online. Our Associates may additionally focus on identifying and drive improvements in regulated services on risk and governance related issues.

Applicants should be aware that whilst these roles should not involve direct exposure to illegal content, they could include working time spent on distressing content, material, and themes. Ofcom is committed to safeguarding our colleagues who undertake this type of work and offers a range of tailored support options, including training, annual psychological assessments for those regularly doing this work and 24-hour access to counselling services.

• Support your team to build and maintain sustainable relationships with relevant online services
• Develop knowledge and expertise in your supervised services and across Ofcom’s online safety programme, keeping across online safety, markets and tech developments
• Understand, assess and, where necessary, support improvements in protections offered to users and other obligations (including risk assessment duties) under the Online Safety Act
• Identify and support research, information gathering and analysis about the services you supervise and ensure analysis and outputs are drawn together for the wider team
• Ensure the delivery of clear, concise and focused documents, such as meeting notes, agendas, briefings and research reports, for internal use or external publication
• Own and prioritise your workload to ensure we deliver against our strategic priorities
• Build and maintain effective relationships with teams…