Her Story
About Jenny
Jenny VanMarter, BA, MFA, AIRTP, is an AI Red Teaming Specialist with a focus on AI Safety, Ad Policy, governance design, and structured risk evaluation for large-scale AI systems. With approximately a year and a half of experience in the AI field, she specializes in adversarial testing, policy enforcement analysis, and identifying gaps between intended safeguards and real-world system behavior. In her current role, she conducts structured red teaming of AI models, evaluating system responses under both standard and adversarial conditions. Her work centers on translating these findings into actionable insights that strengthen safety frameworks, improve policy alignment, and support more resilient AI systems at scale.
Prior to entering the AI industry, Jenny built a foundation in IT and SaaS environments, working across enterprise systems, technical operations, and user-facing support functions. This experience provided a practical understanding of how complex systems behave in production, including how failures emerge, propagate, and affect end users. It also shaped her systems-level approach to AI safety, where she applies structured analysis to identify edge cases, anticipate misuse patterns, and evaluate risk beyond theoretical documentation. Her ability to connect technical behavior with operational impact remains central to her work in red teaming and governance.
Jenny’s strength lies in bridging technical, legal, and policy domains into clear, actionable frameworks that can be applied across multidisciplinary teams. With a background in technical writing, she excels at translating complex system behavior into precise policy language that is usable by engineers, compliance teams, and leadership stakeholders alike. Outside of her professional work, she is a mother of three and actively engaged in AI research as both a professional focus and personal intellectual pursuit. She is currently preparing to publish her work, contributing to ongoing discussions in AI safety, governance, and responsible system design.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Jenny
01What do you attribute your success to?
My successes are entirely based on my willingness to fight for what I believe in, and finding the right opportunities and the right people. It comes down to choosing to trust that I could make the right decision, even when I didn't necessarily feel like I had all the information I wanted. But being able to trust that I knew a person well enough to know that it was the right choice for me has been key to everything I've accomplished.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I ever received was to trust my instincts, to know when I see what the right choice is, and to follow that, even if it's the hard way. It's about being able to recognize the right path and having the courage to take it, even when it's difficult.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Don't be afraid. Things always look harder on our side of the fence. IT is dominated by men, and it can sometimes be intimidating, feeling like you're out on an island all by yourself. But being willing to do the hard thing, stick your neck out, and ask the hard questions, do the hard work, and they will let you stand toe-to-toe with them. Know what you're worth, and don't be afraid to show it.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
My biggest challenge is actually how unclear and uneven the field is right now. It's very difficult to tell which way anything is going from day to day, because things are going so fast. You kind of feel like you're in a compass spin all the time. Which way's north? Who knows? But finding the thing that you know is going to make the most impact and holding onto it, sometimes it feels like trying to hold on in a tornado. As for opportunities, AI is one of the most opportunity-rich fields there is. Because it moves so fast, and there's so much instinct that comes with this work, there are people that don't necessarily have a computer science background who walk into this work, and as they work with AI, they have this instinctual ability to understand what the machine is doing, where it's gonna go, what it might say next. Because remember that AI is prediction. Our large language models are predictive. So knowing that, you can do almost anything in the field, so long as you have the metal to go out and learn it. I started with absolutely nothing in AI. I taught myself, started teaching myself AI about 2 years ago, entered the field in 6 months. Education isn't gonna win over instinct, always. It's really fascinating to see that happen. Some of the greatest people I've ever listened to lecture on AI do not have computer science backgrounds. They are humanities people like me.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I value determination, going for what you want, even if it's the most difficult thing you've ever done. I value doing the right thing at all costs, and protecting those who need protection. There's a great deal in my work that can change the world, in both good ways and bad ways. And being able to determine the right path, the path that causes the least harm, the optimal balance, is what drives me. I often tell my children, optimal, not perfect. Perfect is an illusion. You can't always make perfect decisions, but you make the best decision that you can, even if it's the hard one. Being able to do that is the thing that drives me every day, even if I'm working with things that would make most people really uncomfortable. That's why I do what I do.
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