Location: Remote from Portugal Contract: Part-time, ***** hours/month (flexible around academic commitments) Duration: 6 months initially, with option to extend or transition to full-time About UsCheckstep 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 ProblemAI 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 OnOne 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.RequirementsActive PhD student or recent PhD in computational linguistics, NLP, AI safety, communication studies, cognitive science, or adjacent fieldStrong publication record or demonstrable research output at top-tier venuesAbility to define a research question with genuine scientific uncertaintyFluency in written EnglishTax residence in Portugal, or right to work under a Portuguese employment contractNice to HaveInterest in figurative language, adversarial NLP, or computational pragmaticsFamiliarity with content moderation, trust and safety, or platform governanceExperience designing annotation schemes, benchmarks, or human-subject experimentsConnection to a Portuguese research institution or willingness to establish one