Recruiter

Own Kairos’s hiring and build a recruiting process that can keep up with our rapid growth.

We’re reviewing applications on a rolling basis.

Kairos is a nonprofit accelerating talent into AI safety and policy. In just over two years, we’ve trained 1,200+ people through our flagship programs:

- SPAR: The largest AI safety research fellowship, with 800+ mentees per round mentored by researchers from Anthropic, Redwood Research, RAND, MIT, the UK AI Security Institute, and others.

- Generator Residency: In partnership with Constellation, a platform for generalist talent to pitch, build, and ship projects that build capacity and infrastructure across the AI safety ecosystem, with advisors from OpenAI, AI Futures Project, METR, and more.

- Global Challenges Project: A workshop series introducing promising students to careers in AI safety and biosecurity, run several times a year across Oxford, Boston, and Berkeley.

- Pathfinder Fellowship: Helping grow the global network of AI safety university groups from a few dozen to nearly 100, with $9.5M in funding over the next two years to support their work.

We see ourselves as a portfolio of highly impactful projects in a fast-evolving field. Over the next six months, we expect to double in size and launch several new initiatives addressing critical gaps in the ecosystem.

Who we hire over the next year, and how quickly we hire them, will shape which programs Kairos can run and how ambitious they can be. Until now, our hiring has been run by our co-directors and a few staff alongside their other work, so we’re looking for a recruiter to take it on full time. You’d run our hiring rounds, find strong candidates, and build the processes that let us hire well as we grow.

• Run Kairos’s hiring rounds end to end. You’ll manage every stage of the pipeline, including application review, work tests, interviews, reference checks, work trials, and offers.
• Source candidates. Many of our best hires have come to us through people we know, so you’ll draw on our programs, our network, and the broader ecosystem to find strong candidates.
• Build and improve our hiring infrastructure. You’ll design and refine applications, work tests, interview questions, and candidate tracking. You’ll also think a lot about how AI is changing the way people apply and how we can use it to run hiring better.
• Help build the team. Beyond running hiring processes, you’ll help scope new roles and weigh in on org design questions, like who we need next and how roles should fit together.
• Support hiring for Kairos Labs. Kairos Labs, our upcoming incubator for new AI safety organizations, plans to launch in early 2027, and you may help the organizations it supports find their first hires.

• Experience with recruiting. Ideally you’ve run hiring processes before, whether as a recruiter or in a role where hiring was a big part of your work.
• Strong judgment about people. You’ll make many calls about who should move forward, and you should be comfortable making them well under uncertainty.
• Good with people. Candidates should enjoy talking with you and come away excited about Kairos.
• Organized and reliable. We often have 5–10 hiring rounds running at once, so you’ll need to keep track of candidates, interviews, work tests, and work trials across all of them without dropping balls.
• Mission-aligned with context on AI safety. You care deeply about making advanced AI go well, and you have enough context on the ecosystem to recognize promising people and understand what our roles need.

Logistics

Our Culture

We’re a small, high-trust team motivated by the urgent challenge of making advanced AI go well. We try hard to figure out where we’re wrong, which means we say uncomfortable things to each other and change our minds fairly often. We value collaborative truth-seeking, a scout mindset, agility, and an alliance mindset with the broader ecosystem.

We also believe meaningful work should be enjoyable. We support each other’s well-being, celebrate wins, and maintain a healthy sense of humor even when the work is hard.

Application Process

We’re reviewing applications on a rolling basis.

If you’re excited about this role but unsure whether you meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply anyway. If you’re interested in multiple roles, apply to the one that best fits your skills and interests, and note in your application the other roles that you’d like to be considered for.

This role’s scope, salary, and responsibilities may evolve, and we’ll keep you in the loop about any changes if you apply.

AI tools help us review applications. If we receive more apps than we can read, some may be declined based on the AI review alone. Learn more →

Questions? Reach out at careers@kairos-project.org.

Know someone who might be a good fit? If your referral gets hired and completes two months with us, we’ll pay you a $10,000 referral bonus. Learn more here.