Research Manager

LOCATION: San Francisco Bay Area or London

Most high-stakes moments in AI over the coming years will involve frontier company insiders having and raising concerns: within companies, to regulators, or through other pathways.

Those insiders tell us they face enormous uncertainty along the “concern raising” path -- from detecting concerns to whether and how to voice concerns with maximum impact and minimal risk, which even legally protected whistleblowing can carry.

To date, no organization has dedicated themselves deeply to delivering the best strategic, frontier-AI-specific guidance to these individuals, their supporters, and their attorneys (our partners). Closing this gap requires a rigorous, well-run research function that can convert open questions into semi-public, actionable guidance.

This role is foundational to enabling this: You will develop, maintain and execute on AIWI's backlog of research questions by recruiting and managing contract and partner (academic) researchers to answer them. The questions you will deal with will be as multi-disciplinary and varied as AI whistleblowing itself -- ranging from strategic to concrete, empirical to conceptual, and AI-specific to psychology or journalistic.

You will drive outputs through to publication in the formats our audiences need. You will work closely with our Head of Guidance and Preparedness, who sets the research agenda, and with our Education Delivery team, who takes finished work to insiders and partners.

This is a foundational hire as AIWI scales by ~1 OOM over the coming year. It combines research operations, light-touch project management of external experts, and hands-on editorial work to ship publications that will directly shape how critical disclosures unfold.

Tasks

About the role

AI company insiders experience dramatic uncertainty as missteps can be highly consequential. The "guidance gap" is most pronounced on strategic and AI-specific considerations: where insiders should focus, what should trigger alarms, and what a robust response looks like when a disclosure happens.

This is a broad, fast-moving research agenda. The Research Manager will report to and work alongside our Head of Guidance and Preparedness.

Sample research questions

• Concrete and Speak-up-specific: What should employees assess when considering exiting their job? How can insiders spot motivated reasoning within their company?
• Strategic: How should we expect employees’ power to develop based on internal deployment scope and model capability? How can whistleblowing disclosures be net negative in expectation? How can we mitigate potential negative impacts of our work? Which instances of organizational culture-change have historically proven successful?
• Barrier-research: What major barriers to “Speaking up” do insiders experience today? What barriers must the community break down for insiders?
• Subject-matter specific: What should employees know about transparency of military contracts? What might early-warning signals look like for LoC incidents? What does adequate incident response look like? What may valuable clarifications to specific company-internal narratives be?

Some of these questions will require multi-month projects and publication process. Some will require a 2-day turnaround in a Google Doc.

Areas of ownership

Backlog ownership

• Maintain a clear, current view of the research backlog: what's open, in progress, stuck, and ready to ship.
• Work with the “Head of Guidance and Preparedness” to translate strategic priorities into concrete, well-scoped research questions.
• Keep the backlog structured, prioritized, and visible to the team; track dependencies and flag when priorities need re-examining.
• Make sure the highest-priority questions are always moving.

Researcher management

• Source contractors and fellows from AIWI's network and beyond, and match them to the questions they're best suited to.
• Scope engagements, agree on deliverables and timelines, and manage the work through to completion.
• Provide substantive feedback on drafts and keep engagements on track -- and step in when they aren't.
• Keep researchers unblocked and delivering on time and at quality.

Output and publication

• Own the draft-to-published pipeline across formats, including: publications, PDF guides, interactive tools, presentations etc.
• Deliver each output in the right format for its audience, and edit it to a publication-ready standard.
• Support our “Education Delivery” team in getting finished work to insiders and partner organizations.

Research infrastructure and network

• Establish and maintain the templates, review processes, and quality bars that let this function scale.
• Where automation can help with problem discovery, literature review, or network maintenance, work with our Tech team to build it.
• Maintain a current, trusted pool of contractors, fellows, and expert reviewers across the domains our research spans, and know who to contact on specific topics.

Feedback into strategy

• Surface how research should be informing us: where AIWI should focus next, which questions keep resurfacing, and which contractor profiles we need more of.
• Flag where our research process itself can improve.
• Contribute to AIWI’s thinking on where our research agenda should develop.

Requirements

Your profile

We expect a successful individual to have multiple of the following traits:

• Excellent judgment on research quality.
• Pragmatism and speed: You can reason accurately on which research requires a 1-week “80/20” turnaround and which requires a larger project.
• Broad range of research interests surrounding the research questions outlined above. Demonstrated interests should include at least a multiple of the following: Technical AI safety or AI policy, organizational dynamics, psychology, law, journalism.
• Collaborator and networker: Much of your work will depend on bringing the right researchers/ contributors onto a project. You should be passionate about proactively developing your network and identifying top researchers to line-up research work for the future.
• You are relentlessly resourceful and operationally strong. You push research over the line and into publication. You are comfortable running multiple workstreams in parallel, chasing loose ends, and getting research over the line -- including by doing hands-on work yourself when needed.
• You have a track record of managing research projects or programs to completion, including managing external contractors, fellows, or academic collaborators. You know how to scope work well, spot when an engagement is drifting, and course-correct while maintaining a good relationship.
• Epistemic humility. You know when to bring in more expert voices, and you actively seek feedback to make sure our thinking is appropriate to the challenges we face.

You do not need a whistleblowing, legal, or security background -- this will be provided by our partners, team members, and external experts. You will however need to be interested in rapidly gaining an understanding of those domains.

Backgrounds likely to be suitable may include:

• Research manager, program manager, or chief-of-staff at an AI safety, governance, or evaluations organization
• Researcher at a frontier company, think tank, or governance organization looking to move into a program-leading role
• Editor or research lead at a policy publication or research outfit with a strong AI or emerging-tech portfolio
• Former researcher at a fundamental strategy hedge-fund with significant AI safety exposure since exit
• Grantmaker or program officer with an AI safety portfolio and hands-on experience shaping research outputs

Benefits

Why join?

• Impact: Own the pipeline that turns AIWI's research agenda into guidance that reaches insiders at the moments that matter most.
• Intellectually stimulating: Work across the most important open questions that AI insiders grapple with, alongside leading thinkers in the field.
• Independence & ownership: Run the research function in consultation with the Head of Guidance and Preparedness, and shape how this function grows as AIWI scales.
• Growth: Join at a formative moment. This role has a clear path to expanding scope as the organization grows.
• A supportive team: Who will stand by your side.
• Competitive compensation and runway secured until 2029.

Who you'd be joining

AIWI is an independent non-profit launched in late 2024. We are ~4 FTE today and are scaling to ~15 FTE within the year, spread across the Bay Area, DC, and London. Joining now, you will significantly shape what the future of AI insider support looks like. We are funded until 2029.

Examples of our work to date:

• Policy: We led to the creation of the world's first AI whistleblowing channel. We pushed for and shaped the EU AI Office's channel. Ask us about our US work.
• Insider education & support: Our online campaigns have reached thousands of company employees. We produce guides (available upon request), online courses, and help establish connections to our great partner attorneys and support (e.g. on legal advice and defense funding).
• Advocacy: Anthropic published its whistleblowing policy and OpenAI strengthened theirs because of our Publish Your Policies Campaign.
• Network: We closely collaborate with the world's leading whistleblowing and AI organizations.

Our ambition is to ensure that each insider disclosure is maximally impactful and safe for the person making the disclosure. Joining us means dedicating yourself to achieving that goal with us.