Head of Talent Operations

Build the talent operations function that places early-career talent in high-impact AI safety roles.

Note: This role description is a first draft. Scope, salary, and responsibilities may evolve, and we’ll keep you in the loop about any changes if you apply.

Update: We’ve updated this description to move recruiting out of this role and into a separate Recruiter role.

We’re reviewing applications on a rolling basis.

  About Kairos

Kairos is a nonprofit accelerating talent into AI safety and policy. In just over two years, we’ve trained 1,200+ people through our flagship programs:

• SPAR: The largest AI safety research fellowship, with 800+ mentees per round mentored by researchers from Anthropic, Redwood Research, RAND, MIT, the UK AI Security Institute, and others.

• Generator Residency: In partnership with Constellation, a platform for generalist talent to pitch, build, and ship projects that build capacity and infrastructure across the AI safety ecosystem, with advisors from OpenAI, AI Futures Project, METR, and more.

• Global Challenges Project: A workshop series introducing promising students to careers in AI safety and biosecurity, run several times a year across Oxford, Boston, and Berkeley.

• Pathfinder Fellowship: Helping grow the global network of AI safety university groups from a few dozen to nearly 100, with $9.5M in funding over the next two years to support their work.

We see ourselves as a portfolio of highly impactful projects in a fast-evolving field. Over the next six months, we expect to double in size and launch several new initiatives addressing critical gaps in the ecosystem.

  The Role

Thousands of people apply to or take part in Kairos’s programs every year. Talent operations is our new function for identifying the most promising of these people, supporting them, connecting them to high-impact opportunities, and tracking where they end up. Getting people into impactful careers is much of why we run our programs, and there’s much more Kairos and the wider ecosystem can do to help, especially for early-career talent.

We’re looking for a Head of Talent Operations to lead this function, set its strategy, and build the systems behind it. You’d also help grow Talent Commons (our shared, consent-based talent database for the AI safety ecosystem) and manage the recruiter we’re hiring to run Kairos’s own hiring.

  What You’ll Do

• Set the strategy for talent operations. The function is new, and there are many directions it could go. It’ll be up to you to decide what we prioritize, what we build first, and how talent operations grows over time.

• Identify top talent. You’ll build better ways to spot the most promising people in our programs, such as gathering mentors’ signals on SPAR mentees and asking the GCP team which participants stood out at each workshop. You’ll also keep our records on people accurate and up to date, so what our team learns is written down where others can use it.

• Support them. You’ll design what top participants get during and after our programs, such as career advice, introductions to funders, or visits to AI safety hubs, and build relationships with other organizations so they always have good next steps.

• Place them. You’ll match people to open roles, fellowships, grants, and our own programs, both when organizations ask us for referrals and proactively. Part of this is turning informal referral work into a structured and repeatable process.

• Track outcomes. You’ll measure where people from our programs end up, and use it both to improve how we match people and to show what our programs achieve.

• Help shape Talent Commons. Talent Commons lets organizations find promising people who have come through each other’s programs. You’ll help decide how it’s used across the AI safety ecosystem, including bringing hiring organizations onto the platform.

• Manage our recruiter. You’ll support them on priorities and process as they run our hiring rounds.

• Contribute to Kairos beyond talent operations. As bandwidth allows, you’ll help shape org-wide strategy, weigh in on new programs, and participate in cross-cutting work.

  Who You Are

• You think a lot about talent. You have well-developed views on what makes someone promising and what it takes to get talented people into high-impact work.

• Relationship skills. Placement runs on trust. Hiring organizations should learn that your referrals are worth acting on, and candidates and partner orgs should enjoy working with you.

• Systems skills. Much of this function is making informal, relationship-dependent work reliable at scale. You should enjoy building the processes and tooling for it, and getting busy colleagues to use them.

• Mission-aligned with context on AI safety. You care deeply about making advanced AI go well and have enough context on the AI safety ecosystem to make good calls about who’s doing valuable work and where the bottlenecks are.

• Judgment about people. You’ll make consequential calls about who’s ready, where to place them, and how to structure the placement process as it scales.

While not required, we especially value:

• Direct experience in talent placement, recruiting, or headhunting in AI safety or adjacent spaces

• Experience with hiring, selection, or other processes involving high-stakes decisions about people

• Existing relationships with organizations in the AI safety ecosystem

  Why Work With Us

• You’ll be working toward reducing risks from advanced AI, potentially the most important challenge of our time. Where you place people will directly affect whether organizations working on AI safety get the people they need.

• There’s no existing playbook for this function. You’d design it and build it out, working closely with our co-directors.

• We’re building a world-class team, so you’ll be in good company. Work alongside people who’ve come to Kairos from METR, Coefficient Giving, Rethink Priorities, the UK AI Security Institute, and CEA who share your commitment to impact.

• Collaborate regularly with leading AI safety researchers, policy professionals, funders, and organizers.

  What We Offer

• Salary: $140,000–$195,000 (baseline), $175,000–$245,000 (supported hubs, like London, DC, Boston, and NYC), or $195,000–$270,000 (San Francisco Bay Area), depending on experience, with potential for additional compensation for exceptional candidates

• Location: This is a remote role. We provide access to office space in San Francisco, Berkeley, London, or Boston, with optional coworking elsewhere. If you work from an AI safety office in one of these cities, we cover food, lunches, and office expenses. If you work from home, we cover home office expenses.

• Benefits: Flexible working hours, highly competitive health insurance, dental and vision coverage, generous vacation policy, and professional development budget

• Team retreats: We host all-team retreats three times a year to connect in person, collaborate, and build team culture.

• Travel: Work-related travel and expenses covered.

  Logistics

• Start date: Flexible, though we generally expect new hires to be able to start within a couple of months of applying

• Remote, with expected travel 3–6 times a year for conferences and events, predominantly in the US

• We’d also be happy for you to work out of any of the AI safety hubs in San Francisco, Berkeley, London, or Boston.

• We prefer candidates who can attend meetings in the ET time zone (though our team currently spans GMT-8 to GMT+1).

• Kairos is happy to sponsor visas to the US (typically H-1Bs or O-1As) and will likely be able to sponsor UK visas in the coming months. We can’t guarantee visa approvals, however.

  Our Culture

We’re a small, high-trust team motivated by the urgent challenge of making advanced AI go well. We try hard to figure out where we’re wrong, which means we say uncomfortable things to each other and change our minds fairly often. We value collaborative truth-seeking, a scout mindset, agility, and an alliance mindset with the broader ecosystem.

We also believe meaningful work should be enjoyable. We support each other’s well-being, celebrate wins, and maintain a healthy sense of humor even when the work is hard.

  Application Process

We’re reviewing applications on a rolling basis.

1. Application form (10–20 mins)

2. Take-home assignment (2–4 hours, paid)

3. Interview (45 mins)

4. Reference checks

5. Work trial (3 days, paid)

6. Offer

If you’re excited about this role but unsure whether you meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply anyway. If you’re interested in multiple roles, apply to the one that best fits your skills and interests, and note in your application the other roles that you’d like to be considered for.

 

Questions? Reach out at [email protected].

Know someone who might be a good fit? If your referral gets hired and completes two months with us, we’ll pay you a $10,000 referral bonus. Learn more here.