Program Officer, AI Model Safety

In A Nutshell Location Hybrid San Francisco, CA, United States

Salary $220,000 - $300,000 / year

Job Type Full-time

Experience Level Mid-level

Deadline to apply October 30, 2026

We are looking for a founding grantmaker for the Foundation’s AI Model Safety program: someone with deep technical fluency in how frontier models are evaluated, audited, and made safer, who can turn that into a grant portfolio and a stronger field.

Responsibilities

• Run the program’s grantmaking across its domains (independent testing and evaluations, industry standards, foundational safety research, AI control, and other new ideas) from sourcing through investigation to getting resources into grantees’ hands.
• Run grant investigations and make grant recommendations to the board.
• Proactively identify the most important projects and organizations that need to exist, and make them happen: scope priority projects, find or develop the right founders, and actively build new initiatives, seeding them if required.
• Work with the AI Resources team to route AI resources to safety grantees and help them absorb it productively.
• Develop the program’s strategy with the team lead: what we should fund, what others in the ecosystem are doing, and where the gaps are.
• Build and maintain relationships across the safety ecosystem: independent safety organizations, AI safety institutes, academic groups, other funders (philanthropic and VC alike), and AI companies’ safety teams.

Skillset

• Have at least 3 years of experience in AI safety, ideally including hands-on research in model safety or evaluations, whether in a research role, on a safety or evals team, in grantmaking, or helping start an organization.
• Have deep, current fluency in AI model safety: evaluations, red-teaming, auditing, interpretability, control, and alignment research.
• Follow frontier AI capabilities and risks closely enough to have independent judgment about them, with views on the risks that matter most and on what each part of the ecosystem should do.
• Have a view on where AI is going, which risks it brings, and what to do about them: your own takes on how capabilities will develop, and what that means for the safety work that will be needed.
• Excel at owning ambitious, loosely scoped projects: you find the right people, convince them to start new work, and support their success.
• Have a relentless prioritization mindset: you evaluate opportunities on impact, tractability, and neglectedness, and act on the ranking.
• Write and communicate: compelling, transparent documents that explain your reasoning and appropriately highlight risks, uncertainties, and downsides internally.
• Are deeply mission-aligned and excited to help ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.

It would be great if you also have

• Grantmaking, VC, or philanthropic experience, especially seeding organizations or sub-fields.
• A research track record in evaluations, interpretability, control, or adjacent technical safety areas.
• Existing relationships across safety organizations, AI safety institutes, and AI company safety teams.

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