Metadata
Title
How to Enter the Responsible Tech and AI Job Market: Theodora Skeadas, HKS MPP 2016, BA 2012
Category
international
UUID
a6ee465cef24425395f7773403ec5f0f
Source URL
https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2026/03/16/how-to-enter-the-responsi...
Parent URL
https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/channels/expand-your-network/
Crawl Time
2026-03-23T04:44:57+00:00
Rendered Raw Markdown

How to Enter the Responsible Tech and AI Job Market: Theodora Skeadas, HKS MPP 2016, BA 2012

Source: https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2026/03/16/how-to-enter-the-responsible-tech-and-ai-job-market-theodora-skeadas-hks-mpp-2016-ba-2012/ Parent: https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/channels/expand-your-network/

My own journey into this space

I became interested in the issues of online speech governance, content moderation, trust and safety, and AI governance through years of work and study in the Middle East and North Africa region, after witnessing firsthand the role of social media in advancing both political movements for greater democracy and hateful behavior, disinformation, and violence.

I witnessed a range of complicated online safety issues during my years spent working with non-governmental organizations in Greece, Morocco, and Turkey during the Arab Spring. I lived in Morocco during Tunisia’s and Egypt’s 2011 revolution, which yielded significant proactive constitutional reform to Morocco, and then Turkey during the 2013 Gezi Park protests, when people expressed widespread discontent with the government’s policies. I observed how transformational platforms like Twitter were in advancing critical political and social conversations. I witnessed governments block Internet services to control the conversation, and challenging debates erupt around important issues like online violence against women, systemic Islamophobic bias in platform algorithms, the proliferation of disinformation and fake news, and mental health and suicide. In Morocco, I worked for nonprofits in Casablanca and Rabat at the intersection of education, youth empowerment, community development, poverty alleviation, and conflict resolution. I used my French to work with immigrant women from Francophone African countries including Mali, Niger, and Mauritania, and my Moroccan Darija to provide educational services to children and adult women living in a low-income neighborhood of Casablanca. In Turkey, I taught at Akdeniz University and researched the barriers to employment for Syrian refugee youth in southeast Turkey and Kurdish Iraq.

I later spent six years at Booz Allen Hamilton, examining public sentiment, social movements, and disinformation using social media for the U.S. Federal Government. I analyzed qualitative and quantitative data across topics including countering violent extremism, counter-terrorism, and cyber security with tools including sentiment analysis, Tableau Software, natural language processing, and econometrics. My work covered issues including how ISIS employed sophisticated social media strategies to recruit tens of thousands of members, how Al Shabaab in Somalia used radio to disseminate its own message, how Turks used digital media to organize around the 2017 constitutional referendum, and how Eastern Europeans responded on social media to NATO’s military expansion in the region. Over these years, I observed growing sophistication in social media across all kinds of users, including violent non-state organizations, non-violent civic protestors, and journalists.

During my two years at Twitter, I worked to foster healthy global conversations and empower digital rights for our global users. I managed all aspects of our Trust and Safety Council, Twitter’s largest public consultative body. I managed a trusted partners program to provide timely support to journalists and human rights defenders globally, to combat issues including platform manipulation, impersonation, fraud, human trafficking, terrorism, and child sexual abuse material. I led the Public Policy team’s knowledge management efforts on issues including antitrust, disinformation and hate speech, and open internet. I created and circulated a monthly research newsletter to the Public Policy team, detailing cutting-edge research on various human rights and privacy-related issues. In partnership with other stakeholders, I helped develop global policies and coordinate global consultations on issues like our world leaders policy, gender-based violence, and human rights impact assessments. I helped develop Twitter’s Content Governance Initiative, a framework comprising guiding principles and standardized guidelines on policy development, enforcement, and appeals. I drove a knowledge management effort across our global civic integrity team, and supported our crisis response work. Last, I supported the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium, which shared takedown data on state-backed information operations with researchers, to boost independent researcher access to data.

Following the 2022 Twitter layoffs, I transitioned into the independent consulting space. For over 3 years, I have worked with a range of non-profits, governments, and companies on issues including AI governance, tech-facilitated gender-based violence, government efforts to combat disinformation, information integrity, journalist safety, fraud, election integrity, and AI philanthropy. Additionally, I joined DoorDash full-time as the Community Policy Manager nearly 2 years ago. At DoorDash, I build trust and safety policies for the company. And, as the part-time Head of Red Teaming at Humane Intelligence, a nonprofit, I develop hands-on, measurable methods of real-time assessments of societal impact of AI models. I am also now enrolled part-time as a philosophy PhD student at King’s College London Department of War Studies, exploring the relationship between online and offline harms.

Overall, I’ve observed that degradation of trust in media and public institutions, an increase in disinformation, and the proliferation of hateful behaviors and violence, has challenged and changed this work over time. As such, there is significant work ahead of us in ensuring that internet-based services remain free of illegal and harmful material while defending freedom of expression. My life and work experiences continue to advance my commitment to this challenging and meaningful work.

Transitioning into this field

Here are a list of resources that can help you access this space:

Job search databases

Communities to join (especially their Slack channels)

Newsletters to subscribe to

Mentoring opportunities

Resources for the Global Majority

List of AI fellowships

Frameworks or taxonomies of harm

Additional resources

About the Author:

Theodora Skeadas is a policy professional with 13 years of experience at the intersection of technology, society, and safety. As Head of Red Teaming at Humane Intelligence, she develops hands-on, measurable methods of real-time assessments of societal impact of AI models. As DoorDash‘s Community Policy Manager, she builds trust and safety policies for the company. She is a part-time PhD student at King’s College London Department of War Studies, exploring the relationship between online and offline harms. She chairs the Advisory Board of All Tech is Human, and is Co-Chair of the Board of Directors at Integrity Institute.

Theodora graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. in Philosophy and Government, and minors in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Modern Standard Arabic, and Modern Greek, and Harvard Kennedy School with an MPP.

By Guest or External Blog

Guest or External Blog

Send Email\