Standards Analyst

Job Location:

San Francisco - SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103

Position Type:
Full Time

Salary Range: $90,000.00 - $ Salary/year

Title:

Standards Analyst (Youth AI Safety Institute)

Launched in May 2026, the Youth AI Safety Institute is Common Sense Media's newest addition to its programmatic pillar. The Institute establishes safety standards, builds open-source evaluations that AI developers can run against their models, independently tests AI products, and publishes the results to provide transparency and accountability. It is an independent research and testing ground dedicated to ensuring that the AI used by children is safe and developmentally appropriate.

The Standards Analyst will lead the development, documentation, and ongoing evolution of the Institute's AI safety standards for youth-facing AI products and platforms. This is a highly substantive, initiative-driven role requiring deep expertise, strong organizational capacity, and exceptional judgment executed in close partnership with and under the strategic direction of the Head of AI & Digital Assessments. The Standards Analyst must bring substantive grounding in child and adolescent development, youth mental health, or a closely related clinical or developmental field—not to be the expert, but to be a sophisticated and discerning consumer of expert input, capable of identifying the right questions to ask and knowing when to elevate.

The Standards Analyst will not operate with total independence; standards work is a collaborative, overseen process in which the analyst plays a central but accountable role.

Location:

San Francisco, California

Reports To:

Head of AI & Digital Assessments

Salary: $90,000–$110,000

Type:
Full-time, exempt

• In close collaboration with the Head of AI & Digital Assessments, draft, refine, and maintain the Institute's AI safety standards for youth-facing AI products and platforms.
• Translate research, expert input, and evaluation experience into clear, structured, and publicly accessible standards documentation.
• Continually evolve standards in response to new evidence, emerging AI capabilities, expert feedback, and lessons from the Institute's assessment and evaluation work.
• Ensure standards are internally consistent, appropriately scoped, and reflective of the Institute's mission and methodological commitments.

• Participate actively in structured input processes (including expert convenings, working group sessions, and comment processes) as a listener, questioner, and note taker on behalf of the standards function.
• Synthesize input from a broad range of sources, including perspectives that may be in tension, into coherent standards positions, clearly documenting points of consensus, disagreement, and rationale for decisions made.
• Maintain ongoing familiarity with the perspectives of key experts and organizations in AI safety, child development, education, mental health, and related fields to ensure standards reflect current knowledge and debate.
• Communicate the Institute's standards positions clearly to diverse external audiences, including researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.

• Work closely with technical evaluators to ensure that Institute standards are translated into testable, reproducible rubrics and evaluation protocols.
• Identify gaps between standards as written and what can be operationalized in practice, and work with the Head of AI & Digital Assessments to address them.
• Maintain alignment between the standards documentation and the evaluation work the Institute publishes, such that published assessments are clearly grounded in stated standards.

• Maintain rigorous documentation of the standards development process, including how input was gathered, how decisions were made, and how standards have evolved over time in support of the Institute's commitment to transparency and public accountability.
• Draft and maintain public-facing standards documentation that is accurate, accessible, and suitable for a broad audience, including developers, policymakers, parents and caregivers, and educators.
• Produce process documentation, version histories, and methodology summaries that allow external stakeholders to understand and engage with how the Institute's standards are set.

• Manage timelines, workflows, and deliverables across multiple simultaneous standards…