The posting
Location: San Francisco, CA (on-site 5 days/week)
About The Center for AI Safety (CAIS)
The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a leading research and advocacy organization focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. Some of our past achievements include: releasing the most widely used measure of AI capabilities used by all major AI companies, running a large compute cluster to facilitate AI safety research which has been cited over 16,000 times, and publishing a global statement on AI Risk signed by Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and top AI CEOs.
The Role
CAIS is scaling quickly across Research, Public Engagement, and Policy, and our operational infrastructure needs to keep pace.
We're looking for a Senior Manager to join our Special Projects team and work across a variety of high-priority initiatives for CAIS. Special Projects sits close to leadership and takes on the highest-priority, least-defined problems across the organization: the ones without an obvious owner, that span multiple teams, or that need someone to build the plane while flying it.
This is a generalist role by design. You might spend a quarter building the operational backbone for a new program, the next helping scope and launch a go-to-market plan for an initiative, and the one after that designing a process that lets a team run a function on its own going forward. What stays constant is the standard: fast, structured, data-informed execution, and full ownership from A to Z.
A Note on This Opening
This particular req is likely to be dedicated to our Public Engagement team, which runs a growing slate of campaigns, programs, and partnerships in service of one mission: make AI safety legible, urgent, and personal for every American. In this capacity, you'd work closely with the Head of Public Engagement to become the operational backbone behind that work, translating ambitious goals into clear workstreams, owners, milestones, and measures of success, and building the mechanisms that let programs repeat and scale so key work doesn't depend on any one person holding all the pieces together.
Illustrative scope on this team includes standing up the operating model for a new creator program, turning an emerging opportunity into a cross-functional execution plan, building the systems used to prioritize investments and measure impact, or coordinating a complex initiative spanning researchers, communications, agencies, partners, and leadership.
As with all Special Projects roles, the specific focus may shift based on organizational need, but candidates should be excited about the possibility of this placement.
What Unites the Work
Whether focused on Public Engagement or another priority area, the core of the job is the same: bring structure to ambiguity, establish accountability, and keep high-priority work moving without requiring close supervision. You should be equally comfortable structuring an ambiguous problem, influencing decisions, and getting into the details required to make a program work.
Who We're Looking For
You've operated as the connective tissue in a fast-moving organization — someone who can take an ambiguous mandate, build the plan, and pre-wire the decisions that keep research, policy, communications, creative teams, agencies, and outside partners moving in lockstep. You are a strong generalist who can enter an unfamiliar problem space, understand what matters quickly, and build a path from an ambitious goal to a concrete outcome.
Your specific background may look different. What matters most is a track record of independently owning complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives end-to-end and building systems that make an organization more effective over time.
What You'll Do
- Take a fuzzy mandate or priority from leadership and turn it into a scoped plan, timeline, and set of concrete deliverables, defining owners, sequencing dependencies, and managing the moving pieces across teams, agencies, and partners
- Design and stand up new processes, systems, or programs that don't yet exist at CAIS, building operating cadences and repeatable mechanisms (not one-off plans) so they can run and scale without depending on any one person to hold them together
- Lead scaling and go-to-market efforts for new initiatives, from initial strategy through execution and iteration
- Dig into data to diagnose problems, size opportunities, and make the case for a course of action, evaluating new opportunities quickly using research, data, and judgment to assess impact, feasibility, cost, and risk
- Partner directly with leadership and cross-functional teams as a trusted operator on their highest-priority problems, establishing accountability across internal teams, vendors, agencies, and external partners
- Influence without authority: pre-wire decisions, surface risks early, and manage trade-offs to keep cross-functional work moving in lockstep
- Own governance and reporting on the initiatives you run, maintaining a clear view of program health and the broader portfolio, and keeping leadership informed without needing to be asked
- Use data and retrospectives to improve outcomes over time and turn successful approaches into reusable systems and playbooks
- Move between projects as priorities shift, re-scoping and re-prioritizing without losing momentum on any of them
What We're Looking For
- Have 4 to 6 years of experience in management consulting, investment banking, business strategy, GTM strategy, program management, or a strategy/operations role at a high-growth company
- Have a track record of taking projects from an ambiguous starting point to a finished outcome with limited guidance, including managing complex, multi-stakeholder programs and influencing senior stakeholders without direct authority
- Are comfortable moving across very different problems and picking up context quickly, rather than specializing narrowly in one function
- Are strong with data: you can structure an analysis, build a model, and use it to drive a decision, not just report a number
- Are skilled at turning strategy into concrete processes and execution plans, with demonstrated systems thinking: you build repeatable mechanisms, not one-off documents
- Have excellent program management and operational judgment: you know how much process a problem needs, and when process will simply slow things down
- Have experience scaling a team, function, or program, and/or launching something into market
- Have a bias toward speed and a high bar for quality: you'd rather ship an 80%-right plan this week and iterate than wait for a perfect one next month
- Communicate excellently, in writing and in person, and can distill complexity and trade-offs for leadership and non-specialist audiences alike
- Have consistently good judgment under uncertainty, making sound decisions with incomplete information and knowing when to move quickly, investigate further, or escalate
- Care genuinely about AI safety and CAIS's mission, with the willingness to develop deep domain knowledge
Nice to Have
- Prior experience in a startup, scale-up, or other fast-moving, resource-constrained environment
- Experience working directly with executive or founder-level stakeholders
- SQL or other data-querying experience
Salary Range
$150,000 - $200,000 annually, depending on experience.
Benefits
- Health insurance for you and your dependents
- 401K plan + 4% matching
- Unlimited PTO
- Lunch and dinner at the office
- Annual Professional Development Stipend
- Access to some of the top talent working on technical and conceptual research in AI safety
Referral Program
Know someone who could be a great fit for this role? Submit their details through our Referral Form. If we end up hiring your referral, you’ll receive a $1,500 bonus once they’ve been with CAIS for 90 days.
Equal Opportunity Employer
The Center for AI Safety is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, medical condition, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. In alignment with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.
If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please contact [email protected].
We value diversity and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.
