Workshops and Events Lead

For the right fit, we're open to compensating at a much higher pay rate.

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, double our fellowship cohort, and quadruple our team.

CBAI has been the anchor organization for AI safety in Cambridge since late 2022. We serve as the connective tissue between the AI safety research community across Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern — running workshops, convenings, and networking events that bring together researchers, students, and practitioners working on the most important problems in the field.

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

You'll own CBAI's external-facing event and workshop portfolio — the programs that make Cambridge a genuine gathering point for AI safety researchers and that build the field's next generation of talent. This includes three distinct but interconnected responsibilities: scaling and improving the Harvard-MIT AI Safety Workshops held in Essex, MA; running CBAI's monthly city-level networking events; and sourcing, designing, and executing high-visibility specialized research workshops with Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern research groups. This is equal parts community strategy and operational execution — you'll need to be as comfortable designing a workshop curriculum with student group leaders as you are negotiating a venue contract or managing a speaker's travel logistics.

• Own the end-to-end planning and execution of the Harvard-MIT AI Safety Workshops, currently held 5 times per academic year in Essex, MA, with ~40 participants and ~10 guests per workshop

• Work with the Harvard AI Safety Student Team (AISST) and MIT AI Alignment (MAIA) to scale the program from 5 to 8 workshops per academic calendar year

• Curate and invite guests from frontier AI safety research organizations — including Redwood Research, METR, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI's safety teams, and Cambridge-area academics

• Lead participant selection in collaboration with AISST and MAIA, ensuring cohort quality and diversity across partnering university groups

• Design workshop programming: session formats, discussion structures, speaker slots, and career programming

• Gather and synthesize participant and guest feedback to continuously improve workshop quality

• Identify and source opportunities for high-visibility, weekend-long specialized research workshops in partnership with Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern research groups

• Build relationships with faculty and research group leads to develop workshop concepts that serve genuine research needs

• Own end-to-end execution: venue, logistics, programming design, speaker coordination, and participant experience

• As the portfolio grows, take on a managerial dimension — coordinating contractors, volunteers, or support staff to run larger events effectively

• Own and run CBAI's monthly Cambridge AI safety networking events, serving as the connective tissue between researchers, students, and practitioners across the city

• Curate invitee lists, manage outreach, and create programming that makes each event genuinely worth attending

• Build and maintain CBAI's relationships with the broader Cambridge AI safety community, using events as a vehicle for strengthening the ecosystem

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

1. Application Review: We review applications on a rolling basis. 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, interest in the role, and initial questions.

3. Paid Test Task: Strong candidates will receive a paid test task mirroring actual responsibilities — such as designing a workshop agenda, drafting a guest outreach strategy, or proposing a programming format for a monthly networking event.

4. Interview: Top candidates will be invited for an interview, including discussion of your test task, an event design case study, a community strategy scenario, and conversation with CBAI team members and potentially a student group leader or partner.

5. Reference Checks: Conducted for top finalists, followed by a final conversation to ensure mutual fit.

6. Offer: Selected candidates receive an offer and 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.