Senior Program Officer, Technical AI Safety

Responsibilities

• Evaluating technical grant applications.
• Iterating with potential grantees on their research ideas and strategic plans.
• Maintaining strong knowledge of important developments in AI capabilities and safety research, and adapting our funding strategy appropriately.
• Developing strong relationships with key AI safety researchers and other important people in the field, and understanding their views on important developments.
• Explaining our AI safety threat models and research priorities to potential grantees.
• Sharing feedback and managing relationships with grantees, both in writing and conversation.
• Own a significant fraction of our grantmaking strategy, including managing a significant share of our budget, for example, in a subarea of technical AI safety.
• Develop strong relationships with leaders in the field of AI safety.
• Manage other grantmakers on the team.
• Autonomously manage large projects for the team.

Skillset

• Senior Program Officers are typically recognized thought leaders in the field of technical AI safety (i.e. typically bring 5+ years of TAIS-relevant experience) or bring senior-level professional expertise and judgment from other domains combined with significant technical AI safety knowledge (i.e. 2+ years of TAIS-relevant experience and 6+ years of other professional experience).
• You have well thought out views on the sources and severity of catastrophic risk from transformative AI, and in the cases for and against working on various technical research directions to reduce those risks. You communicate your views clearly, and you regularly update these views through conversation with others.
• You are comfortable evaluating a technical proposal for technical feasibility, novelty, and the potential of its contribution to a research area (e.g. to one of the research areas we list in our most recent RFP). You are at home in technical conversations with researchers who are potential or current grantees.
• You can identify and focus on the most important considerations, have good instincts about when to do due diligence and when to focus on efficiency, and form reasonable, holistic perspectives on people and organizations.
• You are conscientious and well-organized, and you can work efficiently.
• You avoid buzzwords and abstractions, and give concise arguments with transparent reasoning (you’ll need to produce internal grant writeups, and you may also draft public blog posts).
• You will push to make the right thing happen on large, unscoped projects, even if it requires rolling up your sleeves to do something unusual, difficult, and/or time-consuming.