Operations Generalist; Berkeley

Help a fast-scaling AI safety research nonprofit run smoothly, and build broad operations expertise across many areas while you do it.

MATS Research finds and trains talented individuals for what we see as the world's most urgent and talent-constrained problem: reducing risks from unaligned artificial intelligence. We believe ambitious researchers from a variety of backgrounds have the potential to meaningfully contribute to alignment, control, security, and governance research. Through our research fellowship, we provide mentorship, training, professional network, and financial support to accelerate their careers and increase their impact.

Since 2021, we have trained over 630 researchers. 75% of pre-2026 fellows continue to work in AI alignment. 10% have co-founded organizations. Our fellows have produced 215+ research papers with 17,000+ citations. And we are just getting started: in the coming year we will expand our program to support even more researchers.

The operations team keeps all of this running. We support a wide range of functions, from events and facilities to people operations, finance, and digital infrastructure, and we care about both building better systems and giving the people we support fast, attentive help.

We are generally looking for candidates who:

• Are excited to work in a fast-paced environment and are comfortable switching responsibilities and projects as the needs of MATS change; and
• Are self-motivated and can take on new responsibilities within MATS over time.

We are looking for proactive, service-minded, and highly organized operations staff to help the MATS program in Berkeley grow, and to give our fellows the best possible experience. As an Operations Generalist, you will support fellows, mentors, and staff so they can focus on their core work, and you will help keep the organization and the program running day to day.

The exact mix of your responsibilities will be shaped by your strengths and interests and by the organization's priorities at the time. Ideal candidates are detail-oriented, adaptable, organized, and are able to communicate clearly and concisely both verbally and in writing.

Your core work will be to keep the organization and the fellowship running smoothly while staying responsive to whatever comes up. This varies day to day and by your strengths and interests, but may include:

• Supporting fellows, mentors, and staff:respond to requests and help create a comfortable, productive environment.
• Helping run events:plan and support seminars, lightning talks, workshops, socials, and the end-of-program symposium, including setup and audio-visual support.
• Enable the office and program to function smoothly:coordinate vendors, guests, supplies, and catering, oversee basic facilities needs, and support fellow onboarding and offboarding.
• Building and improving systems:maintain and extend our organizational infrastructure (Airtable, Notion, Google Drive, and more), and automate repetitive workflows, including with AI tools.
• Owning special projects:take point on new initiatives and one-off problems as they arise (creating security procedures for the office,

If you perform well and have interest, you might end up contributing to any of the following areas over time. Most generalists start with a few and broaden or deepen from there:

• Events:planning and running seminars, lightning talks, workshops, socials, the symposium, and our presence at conferences, including logistics and audio-visual support.
• Facilities management:keeping office and event spaces working well, from vendors and maintenance to supplies, safety, and setup.
• Fellow housing:coordinating housing for fellows, including sourcing, check-in and check-out, and working with providers and contractors.
• People operations and human resources:supporting hiring, onboarding and offboarding, documentation, and the policies and systems that help people do their best work.
• Finance:supporting budgeting, expense tracking, reimbursements, accounts payable, and clean bookkeeping.
• IT:first-line technical support, managing accounts and access, and keeping hardware, networks, and security dependable.
• Digital infrastructure:designing, building, and maintaining our databases, our knowledge management systems, and our task/project management systems, automating workflows.
• Project management:coordinating cross-team projects, breaking work into steps, and keeping initiatives and their stakeholders on track.
• Office…