Trust & Safety Director

Company Description

Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.

Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it.

Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com

We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.

If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to adjustments@depop.com.

Trust and Safety at Depop

 Keeping our community safe on Depop requires both industry-leading policies and operational processes that allow us to protect our users. The Trust and Safety team at Depop support our community through both direct support interactions as well as building scalable solutions to keep our users safe.

To support our company-wide efforts to protect users every day we need a strategic and experienced leader who is eager to learn, and is excited to build systems to support millions of people.  This critical role is tasked with. The Director of Trust and Safety will continue to develop a high performing team who lead change throughout the organisation.

We value people who can think strategically using macro-level insights, while still caring for micro-level cases affecting our community. We're targeting an intellectually curious individual who is comfortable operating in ambiguity - a strategic and creative problem solver with strong analytical skills. 

This is the right role for someone with the drive to take ownership of complex tasks and projects, react effectively to dynamic challenges in a fast-paced, high intensity environment, and independently prioritize their activity to deliver the results that our globally expanding business needs.  Acts as the senior cross-functional leader ensuring strategic alignment across Product, Legal, Community Support, and Policy. Enable constructive dissent, foster diverse perspectives, and drive decisive outcomes at the Management Team level.  

Core Responsibilities:

• Own the strategic vision and operationalisation of Depop’s Global Trust & Safety org

• Champion Depop’s commitment to user safety by embedding user-centric perspectives.  A product-led approach into the strategy and decision-making that shapes trust and safety at scale.”

• Help transform Depop’s Moderation operations and maximise impact of our workforce in partnership with internal cross-functional teams to build next generation services. Drive alignment on staffing, infrastructure, tooling investments.

• Anticipate company-wide vulnerabilities in safety, proactively shape enterprise-level solutions, and guide the organization through ambiguity and change with resilience and vision

• Take ownership of developing and driving plans from inception to delivery

• Develop an understanding of safety issues and the architecture and integration points of Depop’ community safety support processes, products, and policies

• Keep up-to-date on industry trends and emerging issues in the Trust & Safety space

• Be a thought leader in the Trust and Safety domain, partnering with cross functional stakeholders to champion our mission of ensuring that Depop is a safe, trusted space for our community

• Communicate feedback, challenges, roadblocks, insights effectively and concisely to appropriate audiences and stakeholders.

• Develop a strong bench of senior leaders, set the tone for equitable people practices, and create an environment that nurtures future leaders. Proactively advocate for teams by resolving systemic cross-organisational challenges

• Ability to remain calm and effective under pressure and coach teams to effectively navigate and communicate in a fast paced and ambiguous environment.

Required Qualifications

• Significant experience leading teams in Trust & Safety Operations in domains such as content moderation, compliance, risk or authentication.

• Track record of operationalising company vision and strategy into departmental plans and measurable outcomes 

• Critical thinker with the ability to interpret regulatory and policy requirements, and translate them into operational processes

• Proven ability to navigate ambiguity by proactively shaping solutions beyond immediate asks, pressure-testing strategic assumptions, and guiding teams through complex problem-solving at scale

• Effective written and verbal communication and excellent stakeholder management skills

• Experience working/building relationships with cross-functional teams - especially Product & Engineering, delivering impact through communication, influencing teams towards achieving goals.

• Inspiring, empathetic and inclusive leader with respect for diversity of thought

• Strong business acumen, strategic and analytical capabilities with operational rigour and proactive can-do mentality

• Comfortable operating in a fast changing environment, striking the right balance between speed and accuracy.

• Written and verbal proficiency in English (required) and another European language (preferred)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in the technology sector or other fast-paced environment, preferably in a two-sided marketplace

• Technology/UGC platforms industry domain expertise. 

• Experience with process design, implementation, and improvement

• Experience in product-led environment 

Additional Information

Health + Mental Wellbeing

• PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting

Work/Life Balance:

• 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
• Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options *role-dependent
• All offices are dog-friendly
  

Family Life:

• For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees 
• IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow:

• Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews
• Learning budget
• Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources

Your Future:

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
• Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva

Depop Extras:

• In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.
• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!