Special Projects Manager (Communications Team)

Job description

The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is hiring a Special Projects Manager for the Communications Team. The Communications Team produces a high volume of design and digital work — websites, campaign microsites, event identities, reports and assets — for a global audience, often on fast timelines tied to policy moments. We work with a retained external studio that delivers design and development from briefs, supported by a small in-house team. You will be the person who makes that model work - driving diverse projects from initial scoping all the way to completion. The Special Projects Manager will report directly to the Director of Communications. ### **Who we are** FLI educates and engages lawmakers, key stakeholders, and the general public about transformative technologies and their implications. We advocate for policies and approaches that mitigate catastrophic risks while advancing positive futures for humanity. ### As Special Projects Manager, you will: - **Develop briefs:** translate stakeholder requirements into clear, actionable creative and technical briefs, and push back constructively when asks are unclear, conflicting or unscoped. - **Oversee project performance and progress:** work with internal and external stakeholders to define what success looks like for each project, integrate those goals into design and content strategies, and develop/execute comms projects that reflect them. - **Identify, onboard and manage agencies and contractors: i**dentify the skill gaps required to make a project shine, then source and steer talent to fill those gaps through web development agencies or individual freelancers. - **Own quality assurance:** define what "done" looks like — reviewing deliverables against brief, brand guidelines and accessibility standards (WCAG), running structured review rounds, and holding the final quality bar before anything ships. - **Product innovation:** ideate and develop digital products to help achieve FLI’s mission and meet org objectives. - **Run special projects:** deliver multi-month initiatives such as international creative contests end to end. - **Steward brand coherence:** work with the website development agency to maintain our design system and keep high-volume output visually consistent. ### Required experience and qualifications: - Based in a timezone between West Coast, USA and the UK (UTC-8 to UTC+1). - Proven ability to coordinate complex, multi-stakeholder projects — comfortable navigating competing priorities, securing alignment from senior colleagues, and turning messy input into clear direction. - A track record of building or significantly improving delivery processes — intake, review, QA or approval workflows — not just operating within them. - Project management experience across design, communications and/or digital/web projects, ideally including managing external agencies. ### Required skills and qualities: - Genuine interest in FLI's mission and the issues we work on — able to represent our work credibly to agencies, judges, contest entrants and partners. - Sharp quality instincts and the confidence to send things back when they're not right (ideally provable with a portfolio of shipped work you've quality-assured). - Calm under deadline pressure; comfortable saying no and offering alternatives. ### Preferred qualifications, skills and qualities: - Experience running participatory or multi-stakeholder projects — contests, awards, grant rounds, festivals or similar. - Familiarity with website delivery: CMS platforms and enough technical literacy to triage issues and talk credibly with developers. - Working knowledge of SEO and digital audience growth: technical and on-page fundamentals, analytics tools (e.g. GA4, Search Console), and how content and campaign decisions affect reach. - Nonprofit, policy, advocacy or campaign experience.