Operations Manager

The London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA) is the UK's central hub for AI safety. Our mission is to build the ecosystem the world needs to navigate transformative AI safely, by strengthening the capacity, capability, and cooperation of the AI safety field.

Our London hub hosts some of the brightest individuals and organisations in the field: researchers, founders, government officials, and AI safety staff from organisations like Anthropic, Google Deep Mind, OpenAI, and the UK AI Safety Institute. By co-locating these people in the same building, we lower the friction to collaboration, accelerate the careers of those entering the field, and strengthen the organisations working to make AI go well.

The physical hub is the primary way we deliver our mission, which makes how well it runs central to everything we do. LISA is growing fast. The number of people using our space has nearly doubled this year, we move into a much larger home in 2027, and the organisations we host increasingly ask us for help with the unglamorous work of running themselves well.

The systems behind all of this need to grow with it – which is what this role is for.

Reporting to our Director of Operations, you’ll work across everything it takes to run LISA – the building and its services, our people processes, IT, finance and legal, and the projects that turn strategy into things that actually happen – and you’ll be one of the people our resident organisations turn to with operational problems of their own.

No two weeks will look the same: redesigning how we welcome new members, running the IT workstream of our office move, fixing a catering contract, helping one of our organisations set up a process it has never needed before. We’ll point you at what matters most, trust you to find a sensible route to the outcome, and back you to deliver it.

You’ll do it inside a small, capable team and a building full of people working on one of the most important problems of our time – a strong foundation for anyone who wants to become a Head of Operations or Chief of Staff.

• Run projects end to end – scoping, planning, delivery – with colleagues, contractors and suppliers, keeping everyone informed along the way.
• Own whole areas as priorities demand: catering that means members eat well every day; security that keeps the building safe without making it feel like a fortress; the IT systems our team and organisations rely on, alongside our IT consultant.
• Notice what is manual, fragile or about to break as we grow, and fix it before anyone has to complain.
• Write down how things work so others can run them, and keep it current.
• Build the simple reporting – space use, services, member satisfaction – that lets us decide on evidence rather than anecdote.

• Own work streams of our fit-out and relocation – IT, AV, catering, facilities – with the project lead, so that the new building opens working, not just finished.

• Be the person their teams come to: resolve what you can, route the rest to the right expert or provider, and never let a request go quiet.
• Understand their real operational headaches – legal, HR, finance and more – and shape our help into something dependable that scales as the community grows.

You like taking something messy and making it run smoothly, and you enjoy the people as much as the process. More specifically:

• You get things done. You’ve owned problems and projects before, found a way through when the answer wasn’t obvious, and delivered to a standard you’d be proud of.
• You bring order without bureaucracy. You build the process a situation needs and no more, and you’re comfortable moving fast…