Program Manager, Global Challenges Project

Note: This role description is a first draft. Scope, salary, and responsibilities may evolve, and we’ll keep you in the loop about any changes if you apply.

Kairos is a nonprofit accelerating talent into AI safety and policy. In just over two years, we’ve trained 1,200+ people through our flagship programs:

• SPAR:
  The largest AI safety research fellowship, with 800+ mentees per round mentored by researchers from Anthropic, Redwood Research, RAND, MIT, the UK AI Security Institute, and others.

• Generator Residency:
  In partnership with Constellation, a platform for generalist talent to pitch, build, and ship projects that build capacity and infrastructure across the AI safety ecosystem, with advisors from OpenAI, AI Futures Project, METR, and more.

• Global Challenges Project: A workshop series introducing promising students to careers in AI safety and biosecurity, run several times a year across Oxford, Boston, and Berkeley.

• Pathfinder Fellowship:
  Helping grow the global network of AI safety university groups from a few dozen to nearly 100, with $9.5M in funding over the next two years to support their work.

We see ourselves as a portfolio of highly impactful projects in a fast-evolving field. Over the next six months, we expect to double in size and launch several new initiatives addressing critical gaps in the ecosystem.

The Global Challenges Project (GCP) runs three-day residential workshops that help talented individuals explore careers in AI safety and biosecurity. Over the past few years, GCP has run dozens of workshops for 400+ students, mostly in Oxford, Boston, and Berkeley. GCP has a long and successful track record and became part of Kairos in early 2026.

We’re now expanding GCP into a full portfolio of workshops serving different audiences and career stages, with the ambition of becoming the leading field building workshop organizer in AI safety and biosecurity. This means building new programs, new formats, and the systems to deliver reliably at scale.

We’re looking for a GCP Program Manager to build and lead at least two strands of our expanding workshop portfolio, reporting to Sam Glendenning, who leads the Global Challenges Project.

You’ll have broad ownership of your programs, from deciding what they should achieve and who they should serve through to delivering the workshops themselves. This includes outreach and marketing strategy, participant selection, guest recruitment, workshop design, team leadership, in-person delivery, and impact evaluation.

This is an unusually hands‑on role. You’ll shape the strategy behind your programs, build the systems needed to run them effectively, and then lead them in person. Because we run our portfolio experimentally, individual programs may change or be discontinued, but this role is not tied to any single program. You’ll own a portfolio that evolves as we learn what works.

• Own two or more GCP programs. You’ll take responsibility for their strategy, design, delivery, and evaluation. Programs you may own include:

  • Workshops for students newer to AI safety, for professionals considering a pivot into AI safety, or for accelerating people into politics or policy

  • Workshop support for other organizations, from advice and coordination to running workshops on their behalf

  • A high-impact format you propose (we’re open to strong cases for new programs)

• Run programs experimentally. We’re testing which of these programs offer the most value to the ecosystem. You’ll experiment with both the format and purpose of your workshops, and be willing to discontinue programs that aren’t working, even after investing significant time in them.

• Own outreach and participant selection. You’ll develop marketing and outreach strategies, build…