Talent Program Manager

As Talent Program Manager, you'll help talented people move into positions where they can contribute to shaping how the world navigates the transition to advanced AI. How the AI governance field finds, develops, and places its talent is a pressing challenge, and there is significant opportunity for high-impact work as the field grows. You’ll design, test, and shape programs to address that challenge. Projects in your first year might include running and expanding our referral pipeline, piloting a senior visitor program, and/or building career support that continues beyond our fellowship.

For promising applicants who aren't yet in a position to take on the full range of responsibilities, we will consider making an offer at the Associate level first. Applications for this position are now open. The deadline for applications is Sunday, October 4 at 11:59 p.m. BST.

About GovAI: GovAI was founded to help humanity navigate the transition to a world with advanced AI. Our researchers have provided knowledge and assistance to decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society. Our initial research agenda, published in 2018, helped define and shape the nascent field of AI governance. Our staff are based across the United Kingdom, United States, and European Union. One of our main pathways for accomplishing our mission is developing new talent for the field; the Talent Development team leads that work, and this role is part of that team.

About Our Talent Development Work: The Talent Development team's flagship program is our Seasonal Fellowship: three-month cohorts of 60–70 people run twice a year in our London and DC offices, designed to launch or accelerate impactful careers in AI governance and policy. The fellowship is extremely competitive, with an acceptance rate of around 0.5%, and consistently rated very highly by participants. We also run the GovAI US AI Policy Program (GAPP): an eight-week, part-time program for graduate students and professionals from fields such as national security, law, economics, and public policy. Built around guided self-study, workshops, seminars, and discussions with leading experts, it gives participants a technically informed understanding of AI governance while accommodating a busy work or academic schedule.

Why You Might Be Interested in This Role: You’ll work on a challenging open problem. Much of what the field needs most is experienced talent — research supervisors, operations and communications leads, research managers, policy advisors — people who have particular skills but often lack AI governance context and a clear route in. You'll build those routes. You’ll run the experiments. Every program you pilot carries a question: does this route move talent better than the alternatives? You'll design the tests, collect the evidence, and shape what the team invests in next. You’ll improve talent allocation across the field. Organizations across AI governance ask us to recommend candidates for their roles. Your work makes those matches better: the right people surfaced for the right roles.

Role Description: As Talent Program Manager, you'll grow the number and quality of people moving into AI governance work. The role is defined by that aim rather than by a fixed portfolio. Your work will likely fall into four areas:

• Find talent. Build and maintain an overview of who is in the ecosystem, what they are best at, and where they might contribute most. In your first year, that might mean mapping the landscape and implementing systems to keep that map up to date.
• Develop new routes into the field. Design and pilot programs that bring in people our current formats don't fit, from senior professionals to promising candidates we currently turn away. In your first year, that might mean trialing a senior visitor program.
• Place people. Connect fellows and alumni to the roles where they'll count. In your first year, that might mean refining and running our referral pipeline.
• Support people after they leave our programs. Develop ways to help our alumni find and succeed in impactful roles. In your first year, that might mean exploring ongoing career support beyond our fellowship.

Across all four areas, you'll collect input from other team members, assess what looks promising, pilot it cheaply, write up what you learned, and steer our next set of priorities. Treat the list above as a starting point; the portfolio will evolve, with your input, as the evidence comes in. You’ll work closely with the Talent Development team to go beyond the Seasonal Fellowships. Most team members focus on the selection, setup, and programming of the fellowship. Their time goes to supporting the current cohort and selecting the next one; you'll build the systems around the fellowship. You'll also back up the team during fellowship selection periods and cohort peaks.

Selection Criteria: We're selecting candidates who:

• Are excited by our mission and the opportunity to make our programs as impactful as they can be.
• Can take a loosely defined aim to a scoped pilot, a written recommendation, and a clear call to double down or stop.
• Work in a self-directed way: much of this role has no external calendar and needs to be kept moving anyway.
• Build systems that last: processes, databases, and intake systems that keep working after their attention moves on to the next project.
• Judge people well: form accurate, evidence-based views of people's strengths, potential, and fit, and explain those views in terms others can check.
• Run many workstreams in parallel without dropping balls, and flag trade-offs early when capacity runs short.
• Communicate clearly and professionally across the ecosystem: candidates, alumni, senior professionals, and partner organizations.
• Hold themselves to high standards, seek out feedback, and act on it.

We expect strong candidates for this role to come from quite different backgrounds — operations, program or project management, research, or roles where they built something new and ran it.

Salary and Location: This position is full-time and ideally based in our London office. We strongly prefer team members to be in-office, but are open to exceptional candidates who would need to work remotely. We are able to sponsor UK visas. We expect that successful candidates' annual compensation will typically fall between £83,000 ($112,500) and £105,000 ($142,300) if based in London. In some cases where salary considerations would prevent a candidate from accepting an offer, there may also be some flexibility in compensation.

Other benefits of the role include:

• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• A £5,000 annual well-being budget
• A £5,000 annual childcare budget
• A £1,800 annual commuting allowance
• Extended parental leave
• 33 days of annual leave (including public holidays)