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 debugging the research and preparing literature scaffolds, and supporting data collection & analysis, and 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.

Experience supporting complex intellectual work. You have helped others execute complex analytical or research projects. This might come from teaching, managing technical teams, conducting your own research, consulting, coordinating academic programs, or providing substantive feedback on others’ work.

You understand the research process from the inside. You’ve done substantial analytical work yourself (whether in academia, policy analysis, consulting, or industry research). This means you can recognize when a research plan is solid vs. hand‑wavily, identify blockers in someone’s thinking, and suggest concrete next steps.

You're skilled at developmental feedback. You provide constructive feedback that advances the work, rather than simply identifying problems. You can help people strengthen their arguments, tighten their methodology, and present their findings more clearly, even when the specific topic is outside your core expertise.

Excellent communicator. You explain complex concepts clearly and give constructive feedback…