AISST/MAIA Workshop Lead

Job description

For the right fit, we're open to compensating at a much higher pay rate. ABOUT CAMBRIDGE BOSTON ALIGNMENT INITIATIVE The Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative http://cbai.ai (CBAI) is a nonprofit research organization working to advance research and education directed towards ensuring that society navigates a safe and beneficial transition to advanced AI systems. Our work takes the form of producing original research efforts and accelerating AI safety research through fellowship programs. Our inaugural summer fellowship cohort has already published a spotlight paper at the Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop at NeurIPS, accepted papers at ICLR, and some of our fellows have joined Goodfire and Redwood Research. After a successful 2025 launch, we're rapidly scaling in 2026. We will host multiple fellowship cycles, double our fellowship cohort, and quadruple our team. CBAI has been the anchor organization for AI safety in Cambridge since late 2022. We serve as the connective tissue between the AI safety research community across Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern — running workshops, convenings, and networking events that bring together researchers, students, and practitioners working on the most important problems in the field. Refer us candidates https://airtable.com/app4zWdbexhJgyBwp/pagLKlt1Zh0RV163y/form, and receive $5,000 if we hire them. THE ROLE Your primary responsibility will be to own operations for the Harvard-MIT AI Safety Workshops, set to be held approximately 8 times a year in Essex, MA. These workshops, which have now been run a couple dozen times, are responsible for accelerating AISST members, MAIA members, and students from other northeast universities toward high-impact AI safety careers. AISST and MAIA are the country’s two largest, and most historically successful student groups, whose members have gone on to careers at Anthropic, Redwood Research, OpenAI, METR, RAND, IAPS, Coefficient Giving, and more. An ideal candidate would own planning and execution end-to-end, including being responsible for speaker selection and outreach, attendee recruitment and application review, session structure, and physical set-up/take-down. However, we would also be excited to hire an operationally competent candidate who might need to outsource some judgment calls that require an AI safety background (e.g., which speakers to invite, what topics the workshop should cover, who qualifies as a good applicant). In addition to this role’s outsized impact, we also believe that it is an excellent upskilling and network-building opportunity: you will regularly interface with professionals at frontier AI safety organizations, develop deep familiarity with the field’s key people and ideas, and build relationships across the Harvard-MIT AI safety community, one of the most active in the world. The AISST/MAIA Spring 2026 workshops, for example, featured speakers from Anthropic, METR, Redwood Research, Google DeepMind, the AI Futures Project, IFP, CNAS, Eleos AI, RAND, Forethought, CAIS, Encode, and the Institute for Law and AI. Your secondary responsibilities, if time permits, may include support for some of CBAI’s other external-facing events, like monthly networking events in the Cambridge–Boston area; and research workshops with groups from Harvard and MIT. RESPONSIBILITIES HARVARD-MIT AI SAFETY WORKSHOPS (0.7 FTE) - 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) https://aisst.ai/ and MIT AI Alignment (MAIA) https://aialignment.mit.edu/ 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 SPECIALIZED RESEARCH WORKSHOPS (0.2 FTE) - 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 https://www.far.ai/events/caird-workshop-2026 we run in partnership with FAR.AI https://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 CITY-LEVEL NETWORKING & COMMUNITY EVENTS (0.1 FTE) - Own and run CBAI's monthly Cambridge AI Safety and AIxBiosecurity (in partnership with SecureBio https://securebio.org/) 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 ABOUT YOU 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. NICE TO HAVES - 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 WHY THIS ROLE MAY NOT BE THE RIGHT FIT 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. ROLE DETAILS AND BENEFITS Team: You'll report to AISST, MAIA, and CBAI leadership. Salary: $100,000 – $150,000, depending on experience. We also provide: - 5% 403(b) match contribution - Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance - Unlimited PTO policy - Employer-paid commuter benefits - Reimbursement for work-related technology and/or home office expenses U.S. work authorization required (we accept OPT). Location: Cambridge, MA. This role is primarily in-person given the nature of the work, though some flexibility exists between major events. Applications will be accepted and reviewed on a continuous basis until the position is filled. SELECTION PROCESS 1. Application Review: We review applications on a rolling basis. Your application will be reviewed in detail by a CBAI employee. 2. Initial Phone Screen (15 minutes): A conversation with the team manager to discuss your background, interest in the role, and initial questions. 3. 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. 4. 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. 5. Reference Checks: Conducted for top finalists, followed by a final conversation to ensure mutual fit. 6. 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.