Chief of Staff

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

The Alignment Research Center (ARC) is hiring a chief of staff to work closely with the executive director (Paul Christiano) and take on significant responsibility for hiring, governance, management, comms, and automation.

Basic details

• Location : In person in Berkeley. Relocation support available.

• Salary : We anticipate total compensation for this role of around $150k-$250k/year, with the potential for higher compensation depending on the candidate’s fit and experience.

• Employment type: Full time.

• Reports to: Executive director.

• Directly manages: Operations manager.

• Benefits : Unlimited PTO, premium health insurance, long-term disability insurance.

About the role

The Alignment Research Center (ARC) is a non-profit research organization in Berkeley. Our main priority is developing algorithms for white-box analysis of neural networks, an ambitious foundational research bet that could dramatically reduce risks from misalignment.

Our research staff set the research direction while the chief of staff would take responsibility for everything that ARC needs to do to execute as quickly as possible on that direction. They would collaborate closely with the director to understand and define our priorities, lead projects to improve and accelerate the research, and make sure the organization runs smoothly.

ARC has historically been a small team focused on conceptual research, but we are increasingly bottlenecked by hard technical problems and are expecting to scale more aggressively to attack those problems. We currently have 5 full-time researchers, are aiming to hire another 5-10 staff over the coming year, and hosted a dozen visiting researchers this summer as part of our hiring process. Defining our hiring strategy and managing the hiring process will be a core responsibility for the chief of staff.

In parallel with hiring ARC is relying increasingly on AI and this may become the main way in which our organization scales. In early 2026 frontier models started to autonomously solve meaningful technical problems in our agenda, and we expect that to accelerate over 2026 and 2027. This creates a new set of challenges and opportunities: hiring new types of staff, designing new research workflows, arranging model access, and potentially raising much more money.

A chief of staff would oversee our operations manager and generally be responsible for understanding the organization’s priorities well enough to translate them into operational requirements. As the organization grows we expect to hire additional nontechnical staff and an ideal chief of staff would grow into building and managing that team.

ARC shares an office space in Berkeley with many other safety non-profits. METR spun out of ARC in 2024 and we remain in close contact with the broader safety community. Our main focus is our big research bet, but a chief of staff would also support other projects like public engagements or consulting aimed at improving alignment assessment at frontier labs.

Because ARC is growing and changing rapidly a chief of staff would be responsible for collaborating with leadership to define the workflows and structure for the organization rather than inheriting existing processes. We are looking for a candidate who is passionate about the mission and will be resourceful and creative in helping us move as quickly as possible.

Summary of responsibilities

• Hiring .

  • Communicate with candidates to set up interviews and longer visits.

  • Run hiring and decision meetings to coordinate researchers working on technical hiring.

  • Help define and improve our interview and work trial process for all our roles.

  • Lead hiring processes for non-research roles as we grow.

  • Help define our sourcing strategy and lead some sourcing work.

  • Coordinate with MATS and other fellowship programs.

• Management and governance .

  • Help design and run performance reviews.

  • Help improve and implement our compensation policy.

  • Collect feedback about the organization and help us improve visitor programs, meetings, and other research management.

  • Prepare for and host board meetings, and potentially serve as secretary.

• Operations and the long tail .

  • Manage our operations manager who handles legal, finance, and immigration.

  • Help figure out office plans, and coordinate with offices and other organizations

  • Help secure model and compute access as we automate our work.

  • Manage and improve our public engagement (until we hire for that role).

  • Project manage grants, competitions, or workshops that we decide to run.

  • Work with us to define fundraising strategies, and help with fundraising if we decide to scale by 2+ orders of magnitude.

Skills

• Organized, conscientious, and effective at project management.

• A good communicator and collaborator with the director and with researchers.

• Able to work autonomously, set their own goals, proactively solve problems and flag when projects are off-track.

• A light technical background is a plus. You'll be involved in strategic discussions and would benefit from having a high-level understanding of our research agenda.

• Experience running hiring processes is a plus, since it is a major responsibility.

Hiring process

Our hiring process requires:

• A short screening call

• A 2-3 hour take home task. (We compensate candidates for their time if possible.)

• Interview

• Reference checks.

• A one-day on site interview in Berkeley.

When possible we would prefer to do a work trial for 2-6 weeks in order to assess fit before making a full-time offer, but this is not a requirement.

The role is in person. Visa sponsorship is available and we're H1-B cap exempt. Not every candidate is able to get a visa but if you get an offer we'll do everything reasonable to make it happen.

We are committed to equal opportunity in all aspects of our hiring process. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We welcome and encourage all qualified candidates to apply for our open positions.