AI Programme Director

Responsibilities

Lead Longview’s AI grantmaking strategy

• Set the team strategy to reduce AI risk as much as possible.
• Define, monitor, and devise plans to achieve team objectives and key results (OKRs).
• Maintain up-to-date understanding of the AIS landscape.
• Monitor new and existing grant ideas to ensure we investigate the most promising opportunities.
• Propose and investigate potential new grantmaking (sub-)areas.
• Identify the highest impact use of funds that Longview directs (e.g. assessing when to make a grant from Longview’s private Frontier AI Fund or Longview’s public.
• Emerging Challenges Fund, and when to recommend grants directly to individual donors).

Produce a world class grantmaking product

• Review the grantmaking team’s recommendations for consistency and cost-effectiveness.
• Communicate with grantees to investigate proposed work and resolve uncertainties.
• Synthesise experts’ and colleagues’ appraisal of grants’ potential impact.
• Develop and refine the grant investigation process to ensure a high quality bar for all recommendations.

Manage internal and external stakeholders

• Build relationships with experts and organisations in the AI safety field to source grant opportunities, leverage their expertise, and stay informed.
• Collaborate within Longview and with other AI-risk funders to align donor interests with grant opportunities.
• Lead team operations

  Establish and maintain efficient team infrastructure and systems, such as a centralised database to track grant investigations and recommendations (or delegate and supervise this workstream).

• Line manage Longview’s AI grantmakers; ensure the team is supported and productive by applying team management best practices in meetings, performance management, and employee development.

Advise donors

• Discuss the AI risk landscape and grant recommendations with donors via email, video calls, and in-person (depending on candidate skills).
• Coordinate donor-facing materials by the AI grantmaking and content teams to educate donors and explain the impact of donations; produce and review donor-facing materials.
• Collaborate with the development team and the Office of the CEO to successfully manage donor relationships and understand donor preferences.

Skillset

• Adaptive strategic planning: Ability to develop careful, long-term plans and make rapid strategy pivots in the face of new evidence.
• Object-level AI knowledge: Grasp of the basic functioning of modern AI systems (neural networks, LLMs, GPUs), the current state of AI progress (benchmarks, timelines), the landscape of AI safety research, and the nature and potential pathways of extreme AI risk.
• AI landscape knowledge: Knowledge about the key experts and organisations involved in AI safety research and policy, and their respective efforts to address extreme AI risk.
• Incisive thinking: Ability to systematically assess grant proposals, conduct rigorous impact evaluations (including expected value and cost-effectiveness analyses), and make data-driven funding recommendations.
• Excellent communicator: Ability to communicate clearly and persuasively, both verbally and in writing, and to understand and respond effectively to a wide range of interpersonal situations.
• Project management: Skill in organising team workflows to improve the efficiency and coordination of team projects in a fast paced work environment.
• Embody Longview’s operating values: Excellence in service of impact, ownership, direct communication and feedback, kindness, and radical prioritisation.