Posted at: 19 November

Project Development Lead

Company

Future of Life Organizations

The Future of Life Institute is a Boston-based nonprofit organization dedicated to mitigating risks from transformative technologies, particularly AI, through policy advocacy, research, and educational outreach.

Remote Hiring Policy:

The Future of Life Institute primarily hires U.S.-based employees for remote roles, while candidates outside the U.S. may be engaged as independent contractors. The organization supports collaboration across time zones.

Job Type

Full-time

Allowed Applicant Locations

North America, South America

Salary

$120,000 to $200,000 per year

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Job Description

Project Development Lead

Take high-level goals and move them towards and through concrete plans. 

FLF’s mission is to steer transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks. FLF researches which organizations, projects, or fields would be most useful in steering technology towards benefiting humanity, and then works to help establish those structures. Some of our existing strategies for this include headhunting project leaders, soliciting targeted grant requests from organizations or individuals working in priority spaces , working to develop the MVP of products ourselves or in concert with contractors, or our recent AI for Human Reasoning fellowship. These culminate in incubating organizations that aim to achieve the outcomes we believe would be beneficial. 

This would be a good role for you if you:

    • Are good at orienting to new spaces, and performing research to understand the status quo, unaddressed needs, and opportunities to engage with existing initiatives
    • Want to scope plans to achieve ambitious, high-level goals
    • Would equally enjoy executing on others’ at FLF’s plans to achieve these goals as well as figuring out yourself what should happen next with an initiative
    • Like driving things forward and are outcome-oriented 
    • Enjoy working on both “moonshots” and concrete MVPs and are happy to work across multiple unrelated projects
    • Are comfortable outsourcing and managing contractors to increase productivity

Questions you would ask in this role:

    • What products / tools / technologies might be feasible to build and deploy? Given the relative difficulty of product/tool/tech adoption, and the tradeoffs with regard to impact, which should we prioritize?
    • How can we get those built? Is this a company? A non-profit? Something we build internally?
    • Do we have a clear enough idea of what to build that we can scope it out and commission the work? Or do we need to try building it ourselves first, or solicit ideas from the public via RFPs or find new people to explore work here via a fellowship?
    • Which parts of this agenda will the market likely take care of?

Actions you would often be taking:

    • Sync with other FLF team members to understand our vision and theory of change for the area
    • Brainstorm / generate / solicit and research ideas for technologies / products / tools that could deliver on those visions
    • Analyze the market, feasibility of ideas, and scope of work required to implement
    • Sync with the team to share and refine thinking
    • Depending on what products / tools / technologies seem most promising (if any), and how well-scoped the work is, make a plan to build in-house / recruit a team / post an RFP / run a fellowship, etc.
    • Write two-pagers to keep the team informed and track the provenance of your beliefs 

Outcomes you would be responsible for:

    • Exact outcomes dependent on what we discover as we explore these areas, but could include:
    • A conclusion that the area is not currently feasible to make progress on, along with an explanation as to why
    • A fleshed-out spec for a product to address one of these areas
    • A sketch of the kind of organization we want to create to tackle one of these areas, along with a plan for recruiting and funding the team
    • A well-run program chosen to address these areas
$120,000 - $200,000 a year
Depending on location and experience (plus full benefits)

Logistics 

* Location: We prefer people with 4+ overlapping work hours with US Central Time.
* (FLF is geographically dispersed, though with a particular presence in the Bay Area.)
* Evaluation Process (subject to change):
— Interview work test (30 minutes)
— Interview with one FLF staff member 
— Paid contract work trial (3-10 hours)
— Interview(s) with other members of the FLF team

Miscellaneous

We encourage you to apply even if your background may not seem traditional for this role! We would rather review a larger pool of applications than risk missing out on a promising candidate for the position. If you have any questions about the role, please do get in touch at [email protected].

We are committed to diversity and 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.
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