Since 2017
Responsible AI & human judgment
Designed early ML-assisted moderation around uncertainty, false positives, human oversight, and product accountability.
Coral / Perspective API
Former Vox principal product designer
Mozilla Coral founding designer
Designing product systems where trust and judgment matter.
I'm Sam Hankins. I design products where the complexity is real but invisible to the people who depend on them: moderation systems, publishing tools, workforce platforms, and wage compliance applications. I helped build Coral from a Mozilla, New York Times, and Washington Post collaboration into platform infrastructure used by 120+ newsrooms, and now I help teams turn 0→1 product ideas into workflows and interfaces people can trust.
Across responsible AI moderation · publishing tools · recruiting workflows · wage compliance
Complex workflows Compliance-heavy products Trust & safety Responsible AI
Who I am
A different kind of product design range.
My strongest work sits where research, policy, engineering, and human judgment all have to become understandable product behavior.
- 01
- 02
High-stakes discovery
Research in contested systems
Worked with moderators, commenters, newsroom teams, workers, recruiters, and operators whose decisions carry real consequences.
300+ interviews across 150+ newsrooms
- 03
Open source + scale
Engineering-fluent product strategy
Comfortable shaping scope with engineers because implementation tradeoffs, performance, and maintainability are part of the design material.
Mozilla roots, Vox Media scale
- 04
JD background
Law and compliance as product material
Translate policy ambiguity into usable workflows: rules, exceptions, confidence levels, auditability, escalation, and plain language.
Labor, DSA, trust and safety
- 05
Independent practice
0 to 1 systems builder
Use AI and code fluency to move from ambiguous need to working product logic, prototypes, and production-ready workflows.
rssHQ and Check My Checks
Selected work
Product design decisions from high-stakes systems.
The case studies are framed around what I owned: problem framing, workflow shape, interaction models, product constraints, and the system behavior that shipped.
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Coral
01Signal, Not Verdict
Designing AI into moderator judgment. The approach that shaped how trust and safety teams now think about AI in moderation.
- Role
- Founding product designer for Coral's AI-assisted moderation work
- Designed
- Moderator judgment flows, uncertainty states, and human-in-the-loop safeguards
- Signal
- Responsible AI, trust and safety, and platform-scale product judgment
-
Roadshow Staffing
02The System Held the People
Roadshow Staffing recruiters were holding their candidates in their heads because the tool couldn't hold the relationships. I designed and built rssHQ to change that: every recruiting decision triggers the right downstream actions, so the team can focus on the people instead of the pipeline.
- Role
- Product designer and builder from discovery through production
- Designed
- Recruiting workflows, candidate states, automation logic, and operational defaults
- Signal
- 0→1 workflow systems for recruiters and candidates who need the system to hold context
-
Vox Media / The Verge
03Quick Posts Editor
Designed a short-form publishing tool for The Verge's 2022 relaunch. The work was not to strip down an article editor. It was to create a faster publishing surface while Chorus still handled routing, metadata, embeds, and moderation hooks.
- Role
- Principal product designer across CMS and audience product teams
- Designed
- Short-form composer, publishing constraints, and design system updates inside Chorus
- Signal
- Editorial tooling, cross-team scope, and product design under launch pressure
About
The background behind the range.
I came to product design through journalism, law school, open-source infrastructure, enterprise publishing, and independent product building. That path shows up in how I design: close to the people using the system, honest about the rules it has to carry, and practical about what teams can ship and maintain.
More about Sam +- Mozilla + open source
- Founding designer on Coral, built with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Knight Foundation support.
- Vox Media scale
- Principal product design work across publishing tools, editorial workflows, performance constraints, and cross-brand systems.
- JD background
- A law and compliance lens for rules, exceptions, audit trails, plain language, and people with less power in the system.
Building something complicated?
I'm open to staff/principal IC roles, founding designer roles, and fractional product design work with teams that need research, product direction, and shipping craft in the same room.