Research Manager

LOCATION:

San Francisco Bay Area or London

Most high-stakes moments in AI over the coming years will involve frontier company insiders having and raising concerns: within companies, to regulators, or through other pathways.

Those insiders tell us they face enormous uncertainty along the “concern raising” path -- from detecting concerns to whether and how to voice concerns with maximum impact and minimal risk, which even legally protected whistleblowing can carry.

To date, no organization has dedicated themselves deeply to delivering the best strategic, frontier-AI-specific guidance to these individuals, their supporters, and their attorneys (our partners). Closing this gap requires a rigorous, well-run research function that can convert open questions into semi-public, actionable guidance.

This role is foundational to enabling this:
You will develop, maintain and execute on AIWI's backlog of research questions by recruiting and managing contract and partner (academic) researchers to answer them. The questions you will deal with will be as multi-disciplinary and varied as AI whistleblowing itself -- ranging from strategic to concrete, empirical to conceptual, and AI-specific to psychology or journalistic.

You will drive outputs through to publication in the formats our audiences need. You will work closely with our Head of Guidance and Preparedness, who sets the research agenda, and with our Education Delivery team, who takes finished work to insiders and partners.

This is a foundational hire as AIWI scales by ~1 OOM over the coming year. It combines research operations, light-touch project management of external experts, and hands‑on editorial work to ship publications that will directly shape how critical disclosures unfold.

About the role

AI company insiders experience dramatic uncertainty as missteps can be highly consequential. The "guidance gap" is most pronounced on strategic and AI-specific considerations: where insiders should focus, what should trigger alarms, and what a robust response looks like when a disclosure happens.

This is a broad, fast-moving research agenda. The Research Manager will report to and work alongside our Head of Guidance and Preparedness.

Sample research questions

• Concrete and Speak-up-specific:
  What should employees assess when considering exiting their job? How can insiders spot motivated reasoning within their company?
• Strategic:
  How should we expect employees’ power to develop based on internal deployment scope and model capability? How can whistleblowing disclosures be net negative in expectation? How can we mitigate potential negative impacts of our work? Which instances of organizational culture-change have historically proven successful?
• Barrier-research:
  What major barriers to “Speaking up” do insiders experience today? What barriers must the community break down for insiders?
• Subject-matter specific:
  What should employees know about transparency of military contracts? What might early-warning signals look like for LoC incidents? What does adequate incident response look like? What may valuable clarifications to specific company-internal narratives be?

Some of these questions will require multi-month projects and publication process. Some will require a 2-day turnaround in a Google Doc.

Areas of ownership

Backlog ownership

• Maintain a clear, current view of the research backlog: what's open, in progress, stuck, and ready to ship.
• Work with the “Head of Guidance and Preparedness” to translate strategic priorities into concrete, well-scoped research questions.
• Keep the backlog structured, prioritized, and visible to the team; track dependencies and flag when priorities need re-examining.
• Make sure the highest-priority questions are always moving.

Researcher…