Key information 

Role: Full time.

Location: Global remote with a strong preference for someone based in the UK, US East Coast, or US Bay Area (or willingness to relocate).

Salary: Operations Associate: $68,750–$96,082 / £44,711–£62,485 | Operations Specialist: $85,938–$120,102 / £55,888–£78,107

Compensation is benchmarked to US salaries and adjusted for proficiency and candidate location.

Application deadline: Apply by 11:59 PM local time on Thursday, 18 December 2025.

Ideal start date: March/April 2026.

 

About SAIF

The Safe AI Forum (SAIF) is a US 501(c)3 dedicated to advancing international cooperation to reduce extreme AI risks and ensuring the benefits of AI are shared by all. We specialise in international AI governance—fostering coordination, cooperation, and communication across non-state actors and governments in the most important AI jurisdictions.

Our work focuses on building a trans-Pacific ecosystem of high-trust dialogue on extreme risk and international coordination, identifying the most important and tractable international governance interventions through research, and providing advisory services to key stakeholders. Our flagship programme (the International Dialogue on AI Safety) brings together senior computer scientists and AI governance experts from multiple jurisdictions to collaborate on AI risk, and we also run workshops and working groups.

We're a team of nine based across the UK and US. We're impact-focused and move quickly, balancing rigour with speed and taking genuine ownership of outcomes. Our culture is warm and collaborative—people make time for each other and assume good intentions, even while working at pace on high-stakes problems.

 

About the Role

We’re hiring our second operations generalist to build and maintain the core operational infrastructure that enables SAIF’s work on advancing international cooperation to reduce extreme AI risks. You’ll work directly with our Operations Manager, Harsimrandeep Malhi, taking full ownership of some workstreams while supporting others. 

This is a high-leverage role. We can only do our work effectively if our people, processes, and tools operate with a high degree of reliability, clarity, and cohesion. As SAIF grows, we need someone who can create clarity in complex systems, manage details without dropping anything important, and ensure critical work runs smoothly even under time pressure.

The role is intentionally broad and will evolve as SAIF grows. It combines steady, recurring responsibilities (primarily in People Operations) with higher-variance, project-based work across systems, tooling, administration, and organisational infrastructure. Most weeks will involve meaningful work on hiring and team operations, plus contributions to improving how we operate day-to-day. If you enjoy variety, learning quickly, and bringing order to complexity, you may thrive in this role.

We’re open to candidates earlier in their career (as Operations Associate) as well as those with more demonstrated capability and independent execution (as Operations Specialist).

What you'll do

The exact distribution of responsibilities will depend on your seniority (Associate vs. Specialist), proficiency, and specific strengths. We'll shape parts of the role around the candidate to ensure the best fit and highest leverage, while maintaining a clear core set of responsibilities. Below is our best estimate:

• People Operations [~40% of time]
  • Lead end-to-end hiring process: Own planning, coordination, candidate experience, and hiring process improvement from job posting to onboarding.
  • Develop and maintain people infrastructure: Support the creation and upkeep of employee handbooks, policies and other documentation that help the team work clearly and consistently.
  • Champion team culture: Coordinate team-building initiatives, internal routines, help new hires integrate, and contribute to a thoughtful, collaborative culture.
  • Contribute to talent pipeline development: Help keep track of promising candidates and relevant communities in AI safety and governance.
• Systems & Infrastructure [~30% of time]
  • Maintain & improve internal tooling and systems: Identify and implement tools that meaningfully improve team workflows, handle account setups, and help keep our internal tools and systems reliable and useful.
  • Create and maintain operational documentation: Support in developing, updating, and communicating clear SOPs, guides, and workflow documentation that reduce organisational entropy.
  • Drive process improvement: Identify inefficiencies, suggest changes, and help implement improvements to how we operate day-to-day.
• Operations & Administration [~30% of time]
  • Support compliance and risk management: Help track contracts, maintain required documentation, and coordinate light compliance tasks as needed.
  • Support financial operations: Handle routine financial tasks such as team reimbursements and vendor payments with accuracy and reliability.
  • Maintain our external presence: Ensure our websites, LinkedIn, and other public-facing pages stay accurate, up-to-date, and aligned with our brand.
  • Support strategic initiatives: Assist with special projects, event coordination, and other operational needs as they arise.

About You

There is no single background that predicts success in this role. We strongly encourage applications from candidates who don't tick every box. If you are excited about this role and think you would be great at it, we want to hear from you, even if your background doesn't perfectly match our list. We care most about judgment, reliability, demonstrated learning agility, and commitment to the mission. We expect strong candidates will resonate with several of the following:

Essential requirements

• Strong organisational skills and attention to detail: You catch the typos others miss, track many threads simultaneously, and build systems that prevent things from falling through the cracks.
• Great communication: You communicate with clarity, context, and reasoning transparency across all levels.
• Ownership mentality with bias toward action: You own outcomes rather than just completing tasks, move quickly without breaking things, and solve problems before they become issues.
• Service orientation: You genuinely enjoy enabling others' success and find satisfaction in behind-the-scenes work that amplifies team impact.
• Relevant professional experience: Typically (though not exclusively) 2–4+ years in operations, recruitment, project management, consulting, or early-stage organisations.

Strong Preferences

• Builder mindset: You enjoy working from first principles and creating scalable structures where none exist.
• Recruitment experience: You've owned or co-owned at least part of a hiring process and understand what leads to a great hire.
• Tech comfort: You are comfortable learning new tools, improving workflows, and may even know your way around lightweight automations.
• Mission alignment: You’re genuinely motivated by reducing AI risks and supporting global coordination.

Nice-to-Have

• Familiarity with the AI safety and/or global catastrophic risks ecosystem
• Experience with nonprofit administration (US 501(c)(3), UK CIO, or similar)

Why you might be excited about this role

• You want to meaningfully reduce catastrophic AI risks.
• You enjoy building structure, systems, and clarity.
• You find satisfaction in increasing organisational reliability.
• You like learning new skills and solving a wide variety of problems.
• You want to be part of a small, high-context team where your work directly shapes organisational capacity.

Why this role might not be for you

• You prefer highly specialised, narrowly scoped work.
• You want a very large team with lots of existing processes.
• You find context-switching frustrating rather than energising.
• You want work that is primarily technical or research-focused.

We’re trying to be transparent about what the work is actually like.

Logistics

• Start date: We expect to make an offer by late February 2026, with a preferred start date in March 2026. We understand that some candidates may need longer to exit existing commitments. If this timeline doesn’t work for you, please err on the side of applying anyway and let us know in your application in case we can make alternate arrangements.

• Location: Remote, with a preference for candidates based in the US or UK.

• Benefits: Comprehensive health insurance, an equipment and wellness budget, professional development support, pension contributions (location-dependent), and in-person team building events.

• Working arrangements: Fully remote position with flexibility on working hours, some meaningful overlap with EST time zone for collaboration, and international travel required for team events and conferences (~4-6 times per year).

• Diversity: We aim to employ people with many different experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds who share our mission. We are committed to creating an environment where all employees have the opportunity to succeed, regardless of their race, religion, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation.

• Requests for accommodation: If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact careers@saif.org.

Application process

To apply, please fill in this application form by 11:59 PM local time on Thursday, 18 December 2025. 

The application process will vary depending on the candidate profile, but is likely to include written work and interview components, and potentially a work trial. We offer payment for work samples and trials, conditional on your location.

If you have questions about this role, please contact careers@saif.org. 

Apply here