Open Position: Community Manager

Update: Applications for this role are closed.

The Center on Long-term Risk is seeking a Community Manager, to work on growing and supporting the community around our mission and research. You will have a leveraged role in furthering our mission to address risks of astronomical suffering from the development and deployment of advanced AI systems.

In this role, you would become the third full member of our Community-building team, reporting to Stefan Torges, the Director of Operations. Depending on your skill set, you will take on responsibilities across diverse areas such as event & project management, 1:1 outreach & advising calls, setting up & improving IT infrastructure, writing, giving talks, and attending in-person networking events – making this role ideal for quickly gaining experience across a range of domains. You will receive mentorship from an experienced team, and become familiar with existing processes in a well-running organization, as you work to improve and supplement them. You will also have the opportunity to engage with cutting-edge research in longtermism and AI safety as well as shaping our strategy.

To apply for this role, please submit this application form. The deadline for applications is the end of Sunday 16th October (precisely: 7:30am British Summer Time on Monday 17th). We expect the form will take 30-60 minutes to complete. It can be done in as little as 10 minutes if necessary by skipping the descriptive questions: this may significantly disadvantage your application, but may make sense if you wouldn’t apply otherwise.

Job description

Responsibilities

We are recruiting for this role in order to provide additional capacity in our community-building function. Precisely which areas you work on will depend on your strengths and interests, and we’ll decide this together with you once you start work.

As an illustration of the sorts of things you’ll work on, we expect that the successful candidate will take on several of the following tasks:

  • Running introductory fellowships for people interested in our field of work.
  • Doing outreach calls with students and professionals interested in pursuing careers dedicated to reducing s-risks.
  • Representing our organization at relevant events and conferences (e.g., EA Global).
  • Hosting regular community events in London.

Examples of further responsibilities that a candidate who is a good fit for them could take on include:

  • Running an annual s-risk retreat with 30-50 participants.
  • Running our annual Summer Research Fellowship.
  • Managing applications to the CLR Fund.
  • Improving our internal processes, systems, and metrics.
  • Writing introductory material.
  • Giving talks at relevant organizations and local groups.
  • Setting up appropriate online infrastructure for our community.

Since we are a small team, all members have the opportunity to shape our strategy.

About you

We think this role could provide suitable challenges for someone with 0-4 years of experience in a similar job: it might, for example, be suited to a recent graduate interested in quickly gaining experience in a professional community-building role, and we also encourage more experienced candidates to apply.

The following abilities and qualities are what we’re looking for in candidates. No specific qualifications or experience are required – experience is one good way of demonstrating these skills, but we’re also open to candidates with no experience of similar roles. We encourage you to apply if you think you may be a good fit, even if you are very unsure of your strengths in some of these areas.

  • Problem-solving ability: We’re a small organization and regularly find ourselves in new situations or want to implement a new project. You will need to think creatively to find solutions to problems.
  • Organized & reliable: In this role, you will often have a large number of competing responsibilities, threads to follow up on, and project schedules to follow. You will need to keep track of them effectively, and prioritize between them appropriately.
  • Social skills: You enjoy talking to people and they enjoy talking to you. You can listen well, make others feel at ease, and explain technical matters in a way that is easy to follow. You can also communicate effectively with external service providers.
  • Understanding people: You can spot different kinds of talent and can model how different individuals might impact group dynamics.
  • Commitment to our mission: You will be talking to and engaging people about our mission, priorities, and work. For that reason, we think it’s important you understand and stand behind what we do.
  • Ability & inclination to engage with research related to longtermism and AI safety: Our work is on those topics and to effectively build a community around it will in many instances require a meaningful understanding of parts of these fields.

Given that we are a small organization, we also value candidates who are willing to do less glamorous tasks to bring a project over the finish line.

Further details

  • Work quota: We are open to full-time or part-time candidates, with a preference for full-time.
  • Location: We prefer applicants who will work in-person from our London office. However, we are willing to consider applicants who wish to work partly or entirely remotely. It would be particularly important for candidates to be open to spending an initial period of three months in London while they get onboarded.
  • International applicants: We are a registered UK visa sponsor, and willing to sponsor visas for applicants interested in moving to the UK to take up this position.

Salary

  • The base salary for this role is £60,000 per year depending on the candidate.
    • For part-time applicants, the salary will be scaled down proportionally to your working hours.
    • For applicants based outside London, the salary will be adjusted based on local living costs, in accordance with our compensation policy.
  • We don’t want salary to be what stops someone from contributing to our mission. If you’re interested in this role and CLR’s work but would require a higher salary, we encourage you to go ahead and apply and we’re open to discussing higher compensation.

Benefits

  • 25 days’ paid vacation per year, plus public holidays. We usually grant requests for time off that beyond 25 days.
  • Private health and travel insurance.
  • Pension scheme with default employer contribution of 10% of your qualifying earnings, increasing to 15% to match additional contributions made by you.
  • Catered plant-based lunch available at the office every day.
  • A budget of £8,000 per year to spend on medical interventions and other expenses intended to improve your productivity.
  • Flexible working hours.
  • 20 weeks’ paid leave for new parents.
  • We will pay reasonable relocation costs for candidates who move to London to take up the role.

Why this role?

Role impact

In this role, you can expect to grow our team and the community of people who are committed to reducing risks of astronomical suffering from the development of AI systems. That makes it a highly leveraged opportunity to contribute to that effort.

Professional development

Due to the small size of our organization, your work will be varied and you will be asked to take ownership of projects quickly. Our community is still at an early stage, so we regularly test new projects, which can help you master a variety of skills and provide you with space to propose your own ideas.

You will join an experienced community-building team who will provide you with mentorship. You will work alongside and interact regularly with our researchers. So you have many opportunities to engage with ideas related to risks of astronomical suffering as well as effective altruism, longtermism, and AI safety.

CLR will also actively support your professional development. While we are looking for a candidate who is interested in working with CLR for a substantial period of time, as part of the effective altruism community we are interested in helping you increase your career’s impact even beyond your performance in the current role. Alongside mentorship from our experienced operations team, you will be joining a well-networked longtermist organization. You will receive a budget of £8,000 per year to spend on whatever you think best furthers your professional development, and be supported to attend EA Global conferences.

Application process & how to apply

Stage 1: To apply for this role, please submit this application form. The deadline for applications is the end of Sunday 16th October (precisely: 7:30am British Summer Time on Monday 17th).

We expect the form will take 30-60 minutes to complete. If necessary, the form can be done in as little as 10 minutes by skipping the descriptive questions: this may significantly disadvantage your application, but may make sense if you wouldn’t apply otherwise.

We aim to communicate the results of stage 1, inviting candidates to the second stage, by the end of Friday 21st October.

Stage 2 will be a remote work test, to be completed on your own computer, which we anticipate will take up to 4 hours of your time. Applicants will have 2 weeks to complete the test, and will be compensated with £120 in return for their work. We plan to communicate the results of stage 2 by the end of Friday 11th November.

Stage 3 will consist of one or more interviews with CLR staff. We plan to hold interviews in the week of 21st November, and aim to communicate the results of stage 3 by the end of Friday 25th November.

Stage 4: The final stage of the recruitment process will be a work trial, held in-person if possible, of between 1-10 working days depending on candidate availability. We will cover travel expenses and compensate candidates £200 per day for the work trial. We will also seek references at this stage.

We expect final recruitment decisions to be made by the end of the year. If you require a faster decision than this, please feel free to contact us at the address below.

The above timelines are our aim and we fully intend to stick to them. However, we don’t firmly commit to them, and a delay of, for example, 1-2 weeks by the end of stage 3 is possible. We will communicate to candidates promptly if we expect there to be any delays.

Inquiries

If you have any questions about the process, please contact us at hiring@longtermrisk.org. If you’d like to send an email that’s not accessible to the hiring committee, please contact tristan.cook@longtermrisk.org.

Diversity and equal opportunity employment: CLR is an equal opportunity employer, and we value diversity at our organization. We don’t want to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, social background/class, mental or physical health or disability, or any other basis for unreasonable discrimination, whether legally protected or not. If you're considering applying to this role and would like to discuss any personal needs that might require adjustments to our application process or workplace, please feel very free to contact us.