Research Manager, AI Safety

We’re open to hiring for these roles at different levels. For the right fit, we are open to this role being structured as a Senior Research Manager, and compensation will be commensurate with experience and expected scope, which could be above the pay rate listed here.

The Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative (CBAI) is a nonprofit research organization working to advance research and education directed towards ensuring that society navigates a safe and beneficial transition to advanced AI systems. Our work takes the form of producing original research efforts and accelerating AI safety research through fellowship programs.

Our inaugural summer fellowship cohort has already published a spotlight paper at the Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop at NeurIPS, accepted papers at ICLR, and some of our fellows have joined Goodfire and Redwood Research. After a successful 2025 launch, we're rapidly scaling in 2026. We will host multiple fellowship cycles (Fall, Spring, and Summer), double the fellowship cohort, and quadruple our team.

Refer us candidates, and receive $5,000 if we hire them.

You'll work closely with research fellows and their mentors — renowned researchers from Cambridge and beyond — to support cutting-edge work on interpretability, AI control, formal verification for provably safe AI, evaluations, and various topics in AI governance & policy. We're interested in hiring research managers with technical research experience and governance & policy research experience.

• Conduct frequent 1-1s with your fellows, providing feedback on research progress and helping them overcome obstacles, coaching them through challenges such as but not limited to debugging the research and preparing literature scaffolds, and supporting data collection & analysis, as well as methodology development for the experiments & hypothesis tests

• Provide feedback on your fellows' research and help CBAI create an environment that nudges your fellows to be more rigorous in their approach

• Connect fellows with resources, literature, and opportunities they can explore during and after the fellowship program

• Communicate with your fellows' mentors to define clear research objectives and support your fellows’ research progression

• Contribute to the fellow selection process by reviewing and interviewing candidates to ensure the cohort consists of individuals with strong epistemic standards

• Design reading group curriculum components and workshop programs

• Curate a speaker event series based on fellow profiles and recent important studies

• Support special projects aligned with your strengths (e.g., applicant selection, evaluation frameworks, mentor onboarding)

• Meet weekly with program leadership to enhance feedback loops and continuously improve the program

• Stay current on technical AI alignment or governance developments relevant to your fellows' work

• Prepare weekly briefs on the most recent developments in the field for fellows

We expect you to be characterized by most of the qualities listed below.

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  5% 403(b) match contribution

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  Comprehensive health insurance

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  Generous PTO policy

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  Meals provided during weekdays

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  Employer-paid commuter benefits

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  Reimbursement for work-related technology and/or home office expenses

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  You will also get the opportunity to closely contribute to frontier research and could be acknowledged as a co-author in some of your collaborations.

Location: This position is primarily based in Cambridge, MA. While we expect you to spend most of your time working in-person from our Harvard Square office (particularly during active fellowship cycles), we can offer some hybrid flexibility between fellowship cohorts for candidates with specific circumstances. In those cases, we can give you access to AI safety co-working spaces in Berkeley and NYC.

Start date: May 2026

We use a multi-stage process to find the right fit:

1. Application Review: We review applications on a rolling basis and invite strong candidates to phone screens. We take the hiring process seriously, and this means your application will be reviewed in detail by a CBAI employee.

2. Initial Phone Screen (15 minutes): A conversation with the team manager to discuss your background, understand your interest in research management and AI safety, and answer your initial questions about the role.

3. Paid Test Task: Strong candidates from the phone screen will receive a paid test task that mirrors actual research manager responsibilities — such as providing feedback on a research proposal, designing program components, creating evaluation frameworks, or suggesting a program design change based on the feedback. You'll have a fixed amount of time to complete this.

4. Interview: Top candidates from the test task will be invited for an interview, including some of the following topics:

   1. Discussion of your test task submission

   2. Case study of fellowship program scenarios

   3. Conversation with CBAI team members and potentially a mentor

   4. Deep dive into your approach to research management

5. Reference Checks: For our top finalists, we'll conduct reference checks and a final conversation to ensure mutual fit. We'll discuss logistics, answer remaining questions, and clarify expectations.

6. Offer: Selected candidates will receive an offer and detailed onboarding information.
   

CBAI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law.

In acknowledgement of the research that suggests that women, gender minorities, and other marginalized groups may be less likely to apply for roles where they don’t meet every criterion, we especially encourage people in these categories to apply.

We may use AI to assist in the initial screening of applications, including to detect whether candidates have used AI models in drafting their application. Decisions are always made by a human on our team.