Location: Remote from Portugal
Contract: Part-time, 40–80 hours/month (flexible around academic commitments)
Duration: 6 months initially, with option to extend or transition to full-time
About Us
Checkstep is a trust and safety infrastructure platform helping major digital platforms detect and respond to harmful content across text, image, and video at scale. Frequency Land is our Portugal-based R&D arm, and we're building a research programme around the open scientific questions behind next-generation content moderation.
The Problem
AI moderation systems are brittle. They overfit to surface form, fail on figurative or adversarial language, and can't adapt as communication evolves. We're pursuing a core question: how can platforms consistently identify policy-relevant meaning in novel, figurative, adversarial, or culturally sensitive communication? This sits at the intersection of computational linguistics, communication theory, and AI safety, and it has no satisfying answer yet.
What You'll Work On
One or more research streams, shaped with your input: adaptive policy learning for non-literal language; bias and safety in moderation systems; communication risk in multimodal content; or policy change recommendation and explanation. You'll produce a defined research question, experimental protocol, datasets or benchmarks where applicable, and a publishable technical report or paper.
Requirements
* Active PhD student or recent PhD in computational linguistics, NLP, AI safety, communication studies, cognitive science, or adjacent field
* Strong publication record or demonstrable research output at top-tier venues
* Ability to define a research question with genuine scientific uncertainty
* Fluency in written English
* Tax residence in Portugal, or right to work under a Portuguese employment contract
Nice to Have
* Interest in figurative language, adversarial NLP, or computational pragmatics
* Familiarity with content moderation, trust and safety, or platform governance
* Experience designing annotation schemes, benchmarks, or human-subject experiments
* Connection to a Portuguese research institution or willingness to establish one