Senior Manager, Special Projects

The posting, as Center for AI Safety (CAIS) wrote it

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 detail
[…]
xt 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 contact@safe.ai.

We value diversity and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.