Programme Manager

We’re looking for someone to lead diverse projects, ranging from academic fellowship programmes to online workshops or in-person events, and to help us develop our project management processes across the team. The position offers a unique opportunity to work with a small, highly motivated team in a rapidly developing field. It’s an exciting and varied role for someone who understands people as well as projects, and who can keep an eye on the big picture whilst also paying attention to the details.

Application Deadline 03 August 2025 23:59 GMT

CAIF’s mission is to support research that will improve the cooperative intelligence of advanced AI for the benefit of all. This mission is driven by our belief that many threats to humanity – such as climate change, nuclear war, and pandemics – are problems of cooperation, and that AI will be increasingly important in solving (or exacerbating) them.

Our ambition is to build the nascent field of cooperative AI, improving the ability of AI systems to engender cooperation between humans, machines, and institutions. The recently published Multi Agent Risks report gives some further background. 

Our values are important to us. The “benefit of all” sits at the heart of everything we do. We are relentless in our ambition to have the greatest possible positive impact, both supporting and trusting our staff to perform at their best. We strive to learn from our failures, through a culture of curiosity, openness, and compassion, alongside evidence-based reasoning and rigorous evaluation. With a diversity of perspectives and values forming the core of any cooperation problem, we must also practise what we preach, maintaining plurality, equity, and inclusiveness in all that we do.

The Role
The Organisation

The responsibilities of the Programme Manager will include: 

  • Delivering a portfolio of major and smaller projects which will vary through the year, working with others in the team on their design, delivery, and evaluation in line with our strategy.
  • Ensuring these projects come in on time and on budget, and deliver the impact we are looking for.
  • Working with the CAIF team to develop and improve our project management systems and processes (currently Asana, Google Workspace, Slack). 
  • Supporting team members to implement our project management standards and systems. This might include support with project scoping and initial set up; setting milestones; adapting processes so they are in line with the scale of the project; troubleshooting or pitching in to help keep things on track.
  • Holding the overview of current projects, team availability and timelines, identifying bottlenecks and contributing to capacity planning.
  • Owning CAIF’s progress tracking and contributing to our impact reporting.

We are a fully remote organisation, with regular opportunities to meet colleagues in person. We do not have an office, so the successful candidate will work from home or from a workspace local to them.

We are registered in the UK, and will only be able to consider applications from individuals with permission to work in the UK,  who are either based in the UK or in a location where we can enter into a contract of employment under UK employment law, tax and social security regulations.

Salary
Location

Salaries at CAIF account for demonstrated competencies in line with our compensation policy. For this role we expect salaries offered to be between £47,000 and £52,000.

Our benefits package includes home office equipment; travel expenses to co-locate with colleagues; 33 days of paid holiday (including bank holidays); a 5% pension contribution; a generous learning and development budget; and health and wellbeing support.

Qualifications

The application deadline is 3rd August 2025 23:59 GMT. Please apply using this form. You will be asked to submit a CV and respond to a few short questions. The questions are designed to find out more about you, so we strongly recommend answering them yourself. Your application will be read by one of our team, and generic LLM-generated responses are likely to be screened out. Your data will be processed in accordance with our privacy policy.

Strong candidates who pass the application review will be invited to a short screening interview. From that, shortlisted candidates will be invited to a panel interview, followed by a work test with members of the CAIF team. We hope to communicate final decisions by mid October.

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion, and we encourage people with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply, particularly from underrepresented groups. If you have specific needs or circumstances that require accommodation, please contact us.

Our ideal candidate will be motivated by our mission and values and ideally have some familiarity with the world of research, non-profits or AI safety. You will also have:

  • Experience in leading different kinds of projects in areas relevant to CAIF (such as research, grantmaking, events, policy engagement, or learning programmes). We don't mind where you have gained this experience: it could be in a company, non-profit, academic, government, or voluntary setting.
  • Excellent people and stakeholder management skills: ability to understand people’s different working styles and to work collaboratively across the team and with external stakeholders.
  • Confidence in using the full capabilities of systems such as Google Workspace, Asana, and Slack, and the ability to adapt systems to emerging needs.
  • Efficiency mindset: able to simplify processes, and to suggest and implement automations where appropriate.
  • Able to think ahead and see the big picture across all our projects to identify connected issues and capacity bottlenecks 
  • Completer-finisher, with good attention to detail.
  • The ability to quickly grasp a new context in our rapidly developing field.

Our assessment process is designed to test for these qualifications and motivations.

Application Process