Hiring Associate

As a Hiring Associate at GovAI, you'll help run hiring for our staff roles and field-building programs: moving candidates through each round, keeping our applicant tracking system accurate, and handling day-to-day candidate communications.

In this role, you'll work within rounds led by a Hiring Specialist or the Talent Systems Manager, owning specific stages of those rounds. You'll be a first point of contact for candidates, and you'll follow up with the internal reviewers whose grading keeps each round on schedule.

We're inviting expressions of interest for this role and for a Hiring Specialist position with an initial deadline of October 7th. Submissions received after this date will be given lower priority, but may be considered on a rolling basis. You’re welcome to express your interest in both.

September 4, 2026

About GovAI

GovAI was founded to help humanity navigate the transition to a world with advanced AI. One crucial input to achieving this mission is ensuring that we can identify and recruit exceptionally talented staff, visiting researchers and fellows.

Since publishing our first research agenda in 2018, we have helped define and shape the field of AI governance. Our researchers have published in top venues, including Science and Nature , and work closely with decision-makers across government, industry, and civil society. Our alumni have gone on to influential roles in government (US, UK, EU), leading AI companies (e.g. DeepMind , OpenAI , Anthropic ), top think tanks (e.g. CSET , RAND ), and leading universities (e.g. Oxford, Cambridge).

Our team and affiliate community possess expertise across risk management, threat modelling, frontier AI regulation, technical governance, agent governance, AI economics, international cooperation, US-China relations, and AI forecasting.

Why You Might Be Interested in This Role

• You'll underpin the most important outcomes in talent identification for GovAI.Every outstanding researcher, fellow, or staff member who joins GovAI will have moved through stages you ran. Our processes only find the right people when they're executed reliably — and your operational excellence directly translates to better outcomes for humanity's AI future.
• You'll work where difficult puzzles meet reality.How do you identify the top 30 candidates from 15,000 applications without missing anyone who might be a good fit? How do you run processes that feel personal and engaging even when handling thousands of applications? The answers we design only work if they're executed precisely at scale — and the person implementing it is the first to see where they fall short. What you notice will directly shape how we improve.
• You'll see your work land in real-time.In this role, you'll directly move candidates through our hiring pipeline, watch the templates and fixes you contribute become part of how we run future rounds, and get direct feedback from both applicants and the hiring team on what's working or needing improvement.
• You'll keep the foundation for GovAI's most important work. Our talent development programs have launched careers at OpenAI, DeepMind, the White House, and top universities. The rounds that find the next generation of AI governance leaders will run on the accuracy of your work.
  

Role Description

This position plays a pivotal part in GovAI’s future success — if we fail to identify the top talent for our staff roles, research programs and fellowships, our impact as an organization suffers. Your role is to directly and actively facilitate this talent identification.

You'll keep our hiring rounds running accurately and on schedule, making sure that no candidate is left waiting or lost between stages and that internal reviewers have what they need to evaluate candidates on time. You'll be the first point of contact for most candidate questions. You'll report to the Talent Systems Manager, and work closely with other members on the team.

Responsibilities will include:

• Moving rounds along day-to-day
  
  • You'll own specific stages or critical tasks within rounds a colleague is leading — for example, getting a work test out to fifty candidates, collecting the results, and getting them in front of reviewers.
  • You'll track what's outstanding and chase the internal reviewers whose grading a round depends on.
• You'll work in Airtable every day: updating candidate records, moving people between stages, running existing automations, and keeping the data clean enough to trust.
• You'll make small improvements to the setup as you use it, and flag the larger problems you run into to the person who can fix them.
• Communicating with candidates
  
  • You'll be the first point of contact for candidate questions, and you'll send scheduling, progression, and other messages to guide them through the process.
  • You'll support outreach for your rounds: building and working through contact lists, sending messages, and tracking who has replied.
• Helping improve how we hire
  
  • You'll notice the same problem recurring across rounds before anyone else does, because you'll be closest to it. We'll want to hear about it, and you’ll help build the templates and checklists that stop it happening again.

In your first six months, we expect that you might:

• Support two to four hiring rounds, owning specific stages or critical tasks within them.
• Become the person on the team who knows our Airtable setup best in day-to-day use.
• Handle candidate correspondence for at least one full round largely independently.
• Turn a recurring problem you've noticed into a template or checklist the team adopts.

Selection Criteria

• Excited by the opportunity to use your career to positively influence the lasting impact of artificial intelligence, in line with our organization's mission .
• Unusually careful with detail in work that is repetitive. Much of this job is making sure that nothing and no one gets lost across thousands of records. This is the single most important thing we're selecting for.
• Clear, professional written English. You should be able to write a message to a candidate that goes out without needing to be rewritten.
• Comfortable working in structured data — spreadsheets at minimum. We expect you to be able to pick up new tools quickly and by yourself.
• Reliable follow-through: when you say something will be done, it is done, without needing to be chased.

Nice to have

• Experience with Airtable or with other database, CRM, or automation tools is highly desirable.
• Any prior experience in hiring, recruiting, people operations, or another process-heavy role — including internships, student-society, or volunteer work.
• Some familiarity with the AI safety and governance landscape.

Some profiles that might be a good fit include professionals with one to three years into a first job in operations, administration, recruiting, or customer-facing work; and career changers moving into AI governance from a process-heavy role elsewhere.

Salary and Location

This position is full-time. We have offices in London, UK, and Washington, DC, and we strongly prefer team members to be in-office, but are open to individuals who would need to work remotely. We are able to sponsor visas in the UK and the US and can support relocation.

The Hiring Associate will be compensated in line with our salary principles. The salary for this role will depend on the successful applicant's experience and location, but we expect the range to be between £74,000 and £85,000 if based in London, or between $120,000 and $136,000 if based in Washington, D.C. In rare cases where salary considerations would prevent a candidate from accepting an offer, there may also be some flexibility in compensation.

We also offer competitive benefits, including a 10% pension/401k contribution and private medical cover.

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