Tara Kheradpir currently serves as the Lead of the Strategic Intelligence & Analysis Team within the Trust & Safety branch at Google, where she has worked for the last four years. Prior to this, she worked on Capitol Hill for a United States Senator and as a product sales analyst at Barclays Wealth and Investment Management. In 2017, she created Iranians of America, a social media campaign dedicated to sharing the human stories and contributions of Iranian American immigrants in this country. Tara earned a dual B.A. in Government and Middle Eastern Studies from Cornell University and an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
*Published in the 2025 Alumnae Bulletin
While Tara Kheradpir ’10 has always enjoyed the jobs she’s held and the work she’s done, she believes Google’s Trust and Safety branch is where she truly thrives.
Like most new college graduates, Tara had “no idea” what career path she wanted to take. She began her career working in sales and trading, which she deemed as a “stark wake-up call.”
“I ended up really liking it — I thought I was suited for the trading floor — but I didn’t love the substance of what I was doing.” This realization propelled Tara to find a new job, one that landed her in Washington, D.C. While there, she began dabbling in politics, finding a part-time job on a Presidential campaign and, later, working full-time with a United States Senator. “The rest is history,” she said, smiling.
Working with the Senator’s intelligence committee staffer and observing the intersection of defense and technology policy lit a spark in Tara. She was also in D.C. during the Cambridge Analytica hearings, which she found fascinating. The hearings, centered around digital data privacy, were part of an investigation into a data breach involving Facebook and the consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica.
“This pushed me to go back to school,” Tara explained. She began by making a two-column list, writing out what she liked and didn’t like about each job she’d held thus far. Her findings? “I liked the pace of finance, the substance in government and the freedom of how I worked in tech.”
Straight out of business school, Tara landed at Google, where she rarely has a “typical day.” The Trust & Safety umbrella, under which her team falls, is charged with protecting users and maintaining their trust in Google products and services.
Describing some of her work as “conducting traffic,” Tara remains aware of everything that her team of six analysts (and 50 contractors all over the world) are covering and helps to connect the dots to departments across Google. She analyzes emerging threats and risk trends online, and in the real world, that could potentially impact Google’s products and users — of which, there are billions.
While the work changes day-to-day, Tara explained that at its core, “our job is to identify, evaluate and inform specific people about the risks that are relevant to them.”
As an example, Tara’s team runs Google’s internal geopolitical risk monitor. A team of analysts across the globe monitor events, elections, protests and other occurrences. “Typically, when things happen in the world, it tends to affect Google products,” she said.
Once a risk is identified, Tara and her team provides specific product teams with an account of the issues they’ve seen on the platform in a similar situation and what they project going forward based on recent trends. “We share this information in both qualitative prose and in machine readable data,” she noted, “So they can pipe the data into their automated detection safety systems to ensure their products are insulated from any of those issues.” In addition, Tara’s team tackles cybersecurity concerns, identifying new tricks and tactics employed by scammers to defraud users with the goal of stopping them before anything happens.
“The tech industry is moving at a pace I have never seen before,” Tara stated, referring to the rapid increase in Artificial Intelligence (AI). “This can be exciting because I’m always learning something new…we’re at the cutting edge of technology, [but] it can [also] be extremely complex and challenging.”
Tara’s team, for example, must constantly consider how to “safely develop, train, test and launch these new models and deploy them across existing products” at such a fast rate.
“The AI landscape will bring innumerable benefits, but I also spend time dabbling in the dark side of what could happen,” Tara noted. “However, there are a lot of people at companies like Google who are working very hard to ensure these models are as safe as possible when launched.”
Describing her ethos as “durable but flexible,” Tara aims to have a team structure and processes in place that are “durable enough to not drive us crazy, but flexible enough to be responsive to the needs of the organization in a time when so much change is happening so quickly.” She quipped, “I don’t like to be bored and I never am at Google!”
Tara shared the two things that made her tenacious: “joining a new school in Middle School and being raised by Irani women.” Tara, who entered Chapin in Class 5, gives the School great credit for contributing to her skill sets and making her the person she is today.
“The number of resources and the caliber of the teachers,” she said, are unmatched. “I’m pretty sure Chapin was harder than college.”
“I’m the best writer everywhere I go,” she continued, noting that the same goes for her fellow alums. Chapin’s specialty is its “academic rigor and the way Chapin teaches you to ask questions, organize yourself and think first principles.”
While she reflects fondly on the School’s big events — Field Day and the Thanksgiving Assembly came to mind — the small moments in between are what resonate for Tara. “The quality time with my friends without a care in the world, the times I made my teachers proud or when I discovered a real love of learning because of something a teacher taught me. That’s what sticks out.”
Tara encouraged younger alums and current students not to let being intimidated stop you from trying something new or scary. “Every step you take is one step closer to your goal,” she said. “Look for your North Stars. Take what serves you, focus on who you are and don’t compare yourself. Everyone’s on their own journey.”
“If you’re a curious person and like to learn,” she said, “There is no better place on Earth than Chapin. It really is a special place.”