The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is hiring an Operations Team Member to help our organization scale as part of a nimble operations team. Our operations team is fundamental to the success of FLI —not just supporting across our multiple work-streams, but also actively expanding what's possible by building the systems that let us tackle increasingly ambitious projects without losing momentum. This role reports to our Director of Operations.

About FLI

FLI educates and engages lawmakers, key stakeholders, and the general public about transformative technologies and their implications. We advocate for policies and approaches that mitigate catastrophic risks while advancing positive futures for humanity.

About the role

This role focuses on two primary areas (1) legal, compliance, and contracts, and (2) planning our bi-annual staff retreats. Legal experience is not required—you'll coordinate with and be supported by our external law firms. As with all operations team members, you should also be comfortable as a generalist, pitching in wherever needed. We are a small operations team, and therefore we are looking for a highly communicative individual who can really take ownership over their areas of responsibility and develop solutions for increased efficiency.

We are also interested in increasing our IT support capacity. Though this wouldn't by default form a core part of the role, we are open to adding this to the role description based on candidate preference and role fit.

As Operations Team Member, you might:

Review and negotiate contracts
Manage relationships with external legal counsel
Ensure organizational compliance with nonprofit regulations and reporting requirements in the many jurisdictions we operate in
Plan and execute our bi-annual staff retreat, including venue selection, catering, and agenda support to ensure our team is able to strategise at their best
Jump in to help the wider team in whatever way is most needed

Required Qualifications:

Strong organizational skills and attention to detail
Excellent written and verbal communication
Comfort working with contracts and legal documents (legal background not required)
Ability to manage multiple projects and deadlines simultaneously, rapidly prioritising
Self-directed and able to work independently in a remote environment
Ability to work hours with at least 2 hours overlap with US Pacific Time

Preferred Qualifications:

SF Bay area location (able to work in our Campbell, CA office at least once per week)
Experience at a nonprofit, think tank, or mission-driven organization
Familiarity with nonprofit compliance requirements (e.g., Form 990, lobbying disclosures)
Experience planning events, offsites, or retreats
Background working with external counsel or managing vendor/stakeholder relationships

About the Future of Life Institute

Founded in 2014, FLI is an independent non-profit working to steer transformative technology towards benefitting life and away from extreme large-scale risks. Our work includes grantmaking, educational outreach, and policy engagement.

Our work has been featured widely, including in The Washington Post, Politico, Vox, Forbes, The Guardian, the BBC, The Economist and Wired.

Some of our achievements include:

Pause Giant AI Experiments, an open letter calling for a 6 month pause on the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. The letter has been signed by more than 30,000 people, including Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari, and Andrew Yang.
The Asilomar AI Principles, one of the earliest and most influential sets of AI governance principles.
How would a nuclear war between Russia and the US affect you personally? - A scientifically accurate simulation showing the consequences of nuclear war, with over 6 millions views and a feature in Time Magazine.
AI Safety Index - an objective rating of AI companies on key safety and security domains, as judged by experts in the field.
Superintelligence Imagined Creative Contest - From 180+ submissions, we selected 6 winning artworks that best illustrate the risks of advanced artificial intelligence.

FLI is a largely virtual organization, with a team of >35 distributed internationally, mostly in Europe and the US. We have four offices: Campbell in California, Brussels in Belgium, London in the UK, and Washington DC. We meet in person as a full team twice a year.