Facebook’s Department of Responsible Innovation is staffing up. In February, the department hired the World Economic Forum’s former head of technology policy, Zvika Krieger, as its new “Director of Responsible Innovation.” Now, it seeks a “Responsible Innovation Manager” to work under Krieger and help the department in its mission.

The notion of a “RESPONSIBLE” innovation manager is just fine, if it really makes Facebook more RESPONSIBLE as it creates new products. 

But we think that there is a crying need for an additional department at Facebook: the company needs a “RESPONSIBLE INTERVENTION manager”. 

Their job? To head up a team that can figure out WHAT’S GONE WRONG and do a far better job of cleaning up the messes that the company’s EXISTING products have created for society.

Mark Zuckerberg: If you are reading, we have done you the service of marking up your recent Responsible Innovation Manager job posting to reflect our vision for the position of “Responsible Intervention Manager”. Our changes appear below as red-lined corrections to the original posting. We trust you will carefully consider our proposal and look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Responsible Innovation Intervention Manager

At Facebook, we have a responsibility to everyone who uses our services to amplify the good and mitigate stop the harm – to make sure that people are safe on Facebook, and their information is protected, and that they are not exposed to hate speech, harassment, human trafficking, misinformation, piracy, and all the other toxins that are a direct result of an ad-supported business model reliant on sucking users in with viral content. Many of these issues are not new (in fact, they have been there from the get-go), but and new products and technologies raise new issues that have failed to solve them, which Facebook takes very probably has not taken seriously enough.

As a member of our inaugural Responsible Innovation Intervention team, you will play a key role in supporting Facebook’s ongoing efforts to build scrutinize innovative existing products thoughtfully and responsibly. You will serve as a pivotal team member and a direct resource for many teams broadly across the company, including the hundreds of employees who have taken issue with Facebook’s wildly inconsistent content moderation efforts. The successful candidate will have a strong track record of balancing tactical and strategic work for new old programs in need of a major overhaul. Candidates should be accomplished at building and managing relationships with both internal and external subject matter experts as well as policy makers and other relevant stakeholders shareholders blinded by the company’s lucrative market value, and ideally have experience working in or directly with product teams. 

This position is based in our corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

Responsible Innovation Intervention Manager Responsibilities

• Work closely with a growing cross-functional team to build analyze existing programs focused on that have prevented Facebook from innovating responsibly 
• Work directly with product teams to help anticipate understand the risks of new old products and features, as well as support the creation, execution, and tracking of effective mitigation dissolution strategies
• Design and execute strategies for gaining feedback and buy-in from both internal and external stakeholders, helping them understand why Facebook’s business model is no longer sustainable
• Represent Facebook at external meetings and conferences, where you will explain all the good work you are spearheading to make the company a more responsible corporate citizen
• Manage the creation of communications, educational, and marketing materials to support the program convince people we are actually fixing what is broken this time and not putting Band-Aids on a geyser

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in policy, technology, or academia, or crisis intervention
• Experience understanding the impacts of technology and advising teams and companies on such matters who refuse to acknowledge what is really causing said impacts
• Experience working pushing for positive change inside fast-moving companies/organizations with a penchant for ducking accountability
• Proven experience working collaboratively across a wide variety of functions to drive effective outcomes within a culture of “denial, tension and finger-pointing”
• Communication skills and project management experience
• Experience with consensus-building
• Experience working with and advising technical product teams who may not be very interested in looking to the past to fix what is broken
• Experience operating independently and execute flawlessly on both the strategic and operational level  because there is a good chance, after Facebook announces your hire with great fanfare, that it will quickly and conveniently forget about you as it continues raking in hundreds of billions of dollars from the toxic business model you are desperately trying to fix
• Experience working on a new team with ambiguity and changing responsibilities in the face of fresh new disasters every single day

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree in technology (ex. computer science, engineering, design), policy, philosophy, law, or other relevant field
• Experience representing companies externally and internally at the executive level to mercurial executives masterful at papering over the real problems
• A deep love and empathy for your fellow humans and an almost preternatural ability to retroactively apply it to product design