Program Manager / Program Director, Fellowship

Responsibilities

Program strategy, management, and leadership (40%)

• Lead on the development of our fellowship strategy, working closely with our Executive Director to identify critical gaps in AI journalism coverage and designing fellowship initiatives to address them.
• Build and manage a growing team including hiring, management, and culture-building. You’ll start with 2 direct reports, with the potential to grow to 5+ by 2027.
• Create scalable systems for recruitment, training, placement, and ongoing fellow support to ensure the fellowship can scale smoothly.
• [Director] Make high-stakes decisions about program direction, resource allocation, and strategic priorities.

Fellow recruitment and selection (30%)

• Design and execute recruitment strategies to attract 2,000+ applications from top emerging journalists and AI talent globally each year. The top 0.1% of potential candidates should end up in our program — you’ll ensure this happens.
• Lead a rigorous multi-stage vetting process: reviewing applications, evaluating writing samples, conducting interviews and matching top candidates with host newsrooms.
• Responsible for selecting our final cohort, ensuring we maintain an exceptional quality bar.

Training program design and delivery (30%)

• Oversee our 10-week AI Journalism Fundamentals course and week-long Bay Area Summit, working with senior journalists and AI experts to deliver world-class education.
• Contract with and manage external experts. Past contributors include senior reporters and editors from the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Time, and many more.
• Continuously improve our journalism and AI curricula based on fellow feedback and the evolving AI landscape, ensuring that our training program remains a world-class learning experience.

Skillset

• Demonstrated experience working independently. You tackle large, ambiguous projects and drive them to completion, even when that means doing difficult or unusual work yourself.
• A strong understanding of advanced AI, or the ability to learn this quickly. You understand basic concepts in machine learning (e.g. transformers, gradient descent), can explain various governance topics (e.g. responsible scaling policies, compute governance, capabilities evaluations), and are deeply familiar with the key players & factions in the AI landscape.
• Track record of excellence. You’ve previously achieved outstanding results relative to your peer group. You’ve likely worked at a high-performing startup (as founder or early employee), a prestigious organization with world-class standards (e.g., Alphabet, Gates Foundation), a top newsroom (e.g., Bloomberg, Financial Times, NYT), or a leading AI safety institution (e.g., UK AISI, 80,000 Hours). For the Director position, we’re seeking 5+ years of leadership experience in such organizations.
• Exceptional project management skills. You create robust tracking systems, maintain high standards under pressure, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. You’ve likely managed projects with budgets >$500k, timelines of 6+ months, and 5+ major stakeholders.
• Strong people skills and leadership capacity. You have good judgment about people, can have difficult conversations constructively, and know how to build and manage high-performing teams. For the Director position, we require past experience managing direct reports.
• Clear, compelling communication. Your writing is concise and persuasive. You can explain complex ideas to diverse audiences and represent the organization professionally in high-stakes situations with newsrooms.
• Passion for Tarbell’s mission of supporting journalism that helps society navigate the development and deployment of increasingly advanced AI.