Research Manager

The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a research and advocacy organization focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. The Research Manager will lead empirical deep learning research involving large language models and/or multimodal models while managing team performance, priorities, planning, culture, and execution. The role also contributes to research papers and hiring.

Responsibilities:

• Solve hard problems and unblock the team. Step in when researchers get stuck. Diagnose what's going wrong in an experiment or a research direction, propose a path forward, and get people moving again. You've been senior long enough to have seen these failure modes before
• Manage research performance. Continuously evaluate the quality and pace of the team's work. Give honest, well-calibrated feedback, coach researchers toward higher standards, and surface who is delivering and who needs support
• Set and maintain priorities. Translate the Research Director's vision into concrete priorities for the team, and keep the team's work aligned to them. Push back on low-value side quests and scattered directions; make sure effort flows to what matters most
• Drive planning and accountability. Own project management for the team. Make sure tasks have clear owners and deadlines, that work is actually completed at the quality bar, and that slippage and dropped work are caught and corrected rather than quietly tolerated
• Build a strong team culture. Shape team norms, resolve conflict, support morale and engagement, run an effective meeting cadence, and keep information flowing well across the team
• Write and contribute to papers, and help hire researchers and interns as the team grows