Director, Youth Voice & Engagement

POSITION OVERVIEW

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 the AI that children use is safe and developmentally appropriate.

The Director of Youth Voice & Engagement ensures that young people are not just the subject of the Institute’s work, but active participants in shaping it. This role builds and leads the methodologies and infrastructure for youth participation in AI safety evaluations and standards, including ensuring simulated youth personas used in testing and evaluation are realistic and representative of a diverse range of young people;

designing and running the mechanisms — advisory boards, participatory design workshops, focus groups — through which real youth shape the Institute’s standards; building the external partnerships that bring youth-led organizations into the Institute’s work; and publishing what the Institute learns so the broader AI safety and evaluation field can benefit from it.

The Director will build the Institute’s youth engagement methodology largely from the ground up, helping set the strategy to meaningfully involve minors in sensitive research. This role operates under the direction of the Head of AI & Digital Assessments, with independence in how the youth voice strategy is designed and executed; works closely with the Standards Program to ensure youth input is reflected in the standards and convenings they own;

and works closely with the Common Sense Media Research team to collaborate on qualitative research topics.

Simulation Accuracy & Representativeness

• Partner with internal evaluation and simulation researchers and external partners to assess whether the youth personas used in the Institute’s testing and evaluations realistically reflect how real young people communicate and behave, including on sensitive topics such as self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders.
• Review simulated transcripts, rubrics, and scoring criteria for realism gaps, and translate findings into concrete revisions to personas, prompts, and evaluation protocols.
• Ensure youth simulations represent a range of young people across necessary demographic criteria rather than a narrow or stereotyped profile.
• Ensure youth-centered evaluation frameworks distinguish between lived-experience relevance, clinical appropriateness, developmental appropriateness, and safety risk.
• Work with Standards Analysts and technical evaluators to ensure realism findings are incorporated into the Institute’s published evaluation rubrics and protocols.
• Study how young people actually communicate with AI (e.g., through transcript review, youth interviews, or focus group findings) to inform ongoing realism assessment.

Youth Engagement Strategy & Participatory Design

• Forge and evolve the Institute’s youth engagement strategy, ensuring AI safety standards are grounded in young people’s lived experience and developed in ethical, meaningful, and empowering ways.
• Recruit, onboard, and manage a Youth Advisory Board of 8-10 teens (ages 13-22) that provides ongoing feedback on both content and process across the Institute’s work streams, including setting and maintaining a regular meeting cadence.
• Support Youth Advisory Board members in leading small-group workshops with peers in school settings to surface additional youth perspectives on AI safety.
• Design and facilitate participatory design workshops with youth ages 13-18 on sensitive content areas (such as coded-language and trigger-related standards sections), including transcript annotation exercises, test-prompt writing, and structured feedback on draft principles.
• Ensure youth recruitment for advisory boards and workshops reflects demographic diversity and other dimensions of lived experience, partnering with youth research vendors as needed.
• Coordinate with youth-led organizations to…