[Apply] What I Love About AI Safety Fieldbuilding at Cambridge (& We're Hiring for a Leadership Role)

By Harrison Gietz @ 2025-02-14T17:41 (+11)

This post contains details about the full-time leadership role we're hiring for, and a more personal list of what I love about working on AI safety fieldbuilding at CAISH (maybe you'll love it too).

TLDR: Apply to Join Cambridge AI Safety Hub's Full-Time Leadership Team by Feb 21, 2025

Apply by February 21st (~60 seconds!) to be a full-time member of the leadership team at the Cambridge AI Safety Hub.

You can read our full job listing here.

Cambridge AI Safety Hub is Hiring

The Cambridge AI Safety Hub (CAISH) does AI safety fieldbuilding in Cambridge, UK, targeting both Cambridge students and global talent with our education, upskilling, & research programs.

We are growing, and looking for a new full-time member of our leadership team (ideal start in March 2025, with flexibility). This role would likely manifest as a "co-director" or "deputy director" of CAISH, with high autonomy and ownership of the direction of CAISH's priorities and programs.

We would be very grateful if you:

• Consider applying here.
  • The initial application takes ~60 seconds if you already have a CV!
  • Please have a low bar for applying, even if it feels like you might not be the best person for the role.
• Share our job posting widely.
  • For example, send to 1-3 relevant friends/connections, Slack channels, or your local EA/AIS group.

Role Overview

• Location: Cambridge, UK
• Office space & org structure: CAISH is housed in the Meridian Office, and we get operational support from the Meridian Team – as a member of the CAISH team, you will be employed by Meridian Impact CIC.
• Start date: March 2025, with some flexibility
• End date: June 2025 (but strong likelihood you will be able to continue for summer and the next academic year, July 2025 - June 2026)
  • We strongly prefer candidates who are likely to be able to continue for next year.
• Hours: Full time (40h/week) – but we are open to considering exceptional candidates for part time.
• Visa sponsorship: We are able to sponsor visas to the UK!
• Estimated salary: ~£45,000 - £56,000 per annum

Why Join / What I Love About CAISH

To motivate why I (Harrison, CAISH Co-Director) am excited to fill this role, I want to briefly provide some background on my experience and thoughts on doing full-time fieldbuilding at CAISH for the past ~6 months. This is a non-exhaustive list of some of the things I highly value about working at CAISH as a co-director (and why you might enjoy it too!):

• Fieldbuilding can be very high-energy and diverse work, compared to some other alternatives I had considered before starting this role (e.g. Technical Research, SWE). No day is quite the same!
• It's great for skill-building: a healthy mix of operations, high-level strategic thinking, people management, and sometimes reading technical work.
• Working in a place with many impact-oriented people (like Cambridge) is especially fulfilling. I feel very "aligned" working when everyone around me has an uncompromising focus on impact.
  • There are very few places where you can truly just "do the thing" or just "run the program" that you think will have the most impact with ~no constraints. If you think AI safety is a pressing world problem, then CAISH is one of those places.
• Geography: the intellectual community around a university like Cambridge is very stimulating & motivating.
  • As a Canadian "expat" in the UK, this quaint little English town is a beautiful place to be (and just a 1-hour train-ride away from London)!
  • It also has "intense intellectual" vibes, but without the sometimes-intimidating "deep-rationalist" feel of Berkeley^[1].
• Similarly, I feel like I've significantly developed my skills at being highly-autonomous & entrepreneurial during my time at CAISH.
• I've built up an excellent network, at a rate much faster than I expected.
  • Community building, especially running larger events and programming, gives you an excuse/reason to reach out to a bunch of interesting more-senior people
• As a fieldbuilder, you get paid to think at a high-level about the EA/AI safety community, its priorities, ideas, research, and strategy. This is a thing I previously liked to do anyways, so the work often truly feels like the "get paid to do the thing you love" cliche.
  • Obviously this won't apply to everyone, but I expect it might apply to many EA forum readers (you!)
• As a fieldbuilder, I would argue that in many cases you shape the trajectory of the field of AI safety more than as an individual researcher.
  • As one example, you have say in which researchers you platform as mentors for your research programs

On our job posting, you can read more about some of the work we've done in the past, and more details about the role and candidate expectations. 

Again, you can apply by February 21st, 2025 (rolling).

1. ^{^}

   This sentence has a tone that feels too accusatory to the Berkeley AIS scene, but I think it points at a important distinction between these two places. The aspect of Cambridge that I appreciate could probably be phrased as "gentle intensity", or something like that.