AISST/MAIA Workshop Lead

Own the end-to-end planning and execution of the Harvard-MIT AI Safety Workshops, currently held 5 times per academic year in Essex, MA, with ~40 participants and ~10 guests per workshop

Work with the Harvard AI Safety Student Team (AISST) and MIT AI Alignment (MAIA) to scale the program from 5 to 8 workshops per academic calendar year

Curate and invite guests from frontier AI safety research organizations, including Redwood Research, METR, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI's safety teams, and Cambridge-area academics

Lead participant selection in collaboration with AISST and MAIA, ensuring cohort quality and diversity across partnering university groups

Design workshop programming: session formats, discussion structures, speaker slots, and career programming

Gather and synthesize participant and guest feedback to continuously improve workshop quality

Identify and source opportunities for high-visibility, weekend-long specialized research workshops in partnership with Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern research groups as well as other stakeholders (e.g., Cambridge AI Research Directions Workshop we run in partnership with FAR.AI )

Build relationships with faculty and research group leads to develop workshop concepts that serve genuine research needs

Own end-to-end execution: venue, logistics, programming design, speaker coordination, and participant experience

As the portfolio grows, take on a managerial dimension; coordinating contractors, volunteers, or support staff to run larger events effectively

Own and run CBAI's monthly Cambridge AI Safety and AIxBiosecurity (in partnership with SecureBio ) networking events, serving as the connective tissue between researchers, students, and practitioners across the city

Curate invitee lists, manage outreach, and create programming that makes each event genuinely worth attending

Build and maintain CBAI's relationships with the broader Cambridge AI safety community, using events as a vehicle for strengthening the ecosystem

We expect you to be characterized by most of the qualities listed below.

Mission-aligned — you care about making AI development go well, and want to contribute to building the research community working on it

Experience in operations, event production, or program management — or a track record of equivalent responsibility (e.g. having run conferences, retreats, etc. end-to-end)

Demonstrated ability to own logistics for in-person events of ~50 people: venue coordination, catering, transportation, and physical setup/teardown

Exceptional organization and attention to detail — able to track dozens of parallel workstreams (speaker outreach, applications, vendor contracts) without dropped balls

Strong written communication for professional outreach to senior researchers, guests, and university partners

Comfort working with tools like Airtable and application/review pipelines (or ability to pick them up quickly)

Based in (or willing to relocate to) the Cambridge–Boston area

The ideal candidate will have meaningful experience in event production, academic program coordination, or research community building — ideally in a university, think tank, or mission-driven research organization context. What matters most is that you've built events that people genuinely valued, and that you bring demonstrated judgment in curating rooms that produce real intellectual and professional value.

Familiarity with the AI safety research landscape – enough to make independent judgment calls on speaker selection, workshop topics, and applicant quality

Existing relationships or network in AI safety organizations

Experience working with or in university student organizations, especially AI safety groups like AISST or MAIA

Strong verbal communication skills, such that you could give an opening or closing talk

This is not a research role. You'll be deeply embedded in cutting-edge AI safety research conversations, but your job is to build the environments where those conversations happen — not to participate in them as a researcher.

The portfolio is ambitious and partly unbuilt. The Harvard-MIT workshops are established; the specialized research workshop portfolio is early-stage. You'll need to source opportunities, build relationships from scratch, and create programming where none exists yet. If you prefer inheriting a fully defined scope, this may be challenging.

Workload is uneven. Event-heavy periods are intense. Between major workshops, the pace shifts toward relationship-building and planning. If you need a steady, predictable rhythm to do your best work, this variability may be difficult.

Your impact is felt in the room, not on paper. When a workshop produces a collaboration that leads to an important paper, or a networking event connects someone with the opportunity that changes their career trajectory, that's your win — but your name won't be on it. If you need visible, attributable outputs to feel satisfied, this role will be frustrating.

If this sounds exciting to you, if you want to spend at least a year becoming excellent at building research communities, running high-quality convenings, and contributing to the growth of AI safety as a field from one of the world's great research cities, this role could be a great fit.

Application Review: We review applications on a rolling basis. Your application will be reviewed in detail by a CBAI employee.

Initial Phone Screen (15 minutes): A conversation with the team manager to discuss your background, interest in the role, and initial questions.

Paid Test Task: Strong candidates will receive a paid test task mirroring actual responsibilities — such as designing a workshop agenda, drafting a guest outreach strategy, or proposing a programming format for a monthly networking event.

Interview: Top candidates will be invited for an interview, including discussion of your test task, an event design case study, a community strategy scenario, and conversation with CBAI team members and potentially a student group leader or partner.

Reference Checks: Conducted for top finalists, followed by a final conversation to ensure mutual fit.

Offer: Selected candidates receive an offer and onboarding information.

CBAI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law. In acknowledgement of the research that suggests that women, gender minorities, and other marginalized groups may be less likely to apply for roles where they don’t meet every criterion, we especially encourage people in these categories to apply.

We may use AI to assist in the initial screening of applications, including to detect whether candidates have used AI models in drafting their application. Decisions are always made by a human on our team.