Research Program Manager, Governance

About the job

Responsibilities

• Develop coherent assessments, recommendations, and decision materials for governance bodies and senior leaders by integrating technical, policy, and operational inputs.
• Address emerging or ambiguous questions, test assumptions, identify gaps or conflicting evidence, and determine necessary additional analysis or decisions.
• Critically engage with research, evaluations, safeguards, and risk assessments, collaborating with experts to understand evidence and remaining uncertainties.
• Shape substantive reviews and frame key questions by partnering with governance-body chairs, technical leaders, and stakeholders.
• Translate feedback, recommendations, and decisions into concrete work with accountable owners, milestones, dependencies, and completion criteria.
• Drive work forward across teams, resolve blockers, surface tradeoffs, and escalate disagreements or resource gaps.
• Help teams understand applicable governance processes, integrate reviews into plans, and identify changes requiring further consideration.
• Maintain clear records of decisions, rationale, conditions, commitments, exceptions, and unresolved questions.
• Improve governance practices, standards, and guidance as capabilities, evidence, and circumstances evolve.
• Build and refine practical tools, operating cadences, and sources of truth to enhance work quality and pace.
• Develop trusted relationships across Research, Safety Systems, Preparedness, Security, Legal, Product, leadership, and relevant external partners.

Requirements

• Experience leading complex, cross-functional work in a research, technology, policy, safety, security, governance, or related environment.
• Ability to take initiative, move quickly, and find practical solutions when ownership, requirements, or the path to an answer are unclear.
• Intellectual curiosity and ability to learn unfamiliar subjects to ask sharp questions, test arguments, and recognize when deeper expertise is needed.
• Skill in synthesizing complicated or conflicting information without losing important distinctions, limitations, or uncertainty.
• Clear and precise writing, especially when explaining difficult issues and recommendations to senior decision-makers.
• Strong program-management fundamentals and a record of completing ambiguous requests.
• Sound judgment in sensitive situations, constructive navigation of disagreement, and ability to act independently or seek decisions.
• Willingness to try new approaches, learn from feedback, and adapt thinking based on evidence.
• Ability to build useful structure without adding unnecessary process.
• Deep care for the responsible development and deployment of increasingly capable AI systems.
• Helpful experience includes research program management or strategy and operations in a technically complex organization.
• Helpful experience includes AI safety, preparedness, model evaluations, cybersecurity, or technical risk management.
• Helpful experience includes advisory committees, board-facing work, executive decision support, or other consequential reviews.
• Helpful experience includes translating policies, standards, or governance decisions into practical requirements and programs.
• Helpful experience includes strategic partnerships or sensitive deployment contexts.