Future of Life Institute

About Us

The Future of Life Foundation (FLF) is a new organization, affiliated with the Future of Life Institute, whose mission is to steer transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.

1. Our primary plan for doing so is to work to identify gaps in the landscape of efforts to fulfill this mission, and to then determine what new organizations should exist to address these challenges. Once identified, we will recruit, fund, and provide significant support to founders who demonstrate that they can bring these organizations to life.

Our tentative plan is to help create an average of ~3-5 new organizations per year over the next 5 years, providing each with significant operational support and, if recruited founders’ further develop our research into a compelling proposal, substantial runway.

2. There are other activities that FLF may take on, such as some possibilities for coordination and planning amongst organizations in our field and incubating promising founders. As a new organization, we’re unsure just how narrow or expansive we’ll find our scope of activities to be.

We expect our most significant focus to be on the risks posed by transformative AI, and governance mechanisms needed to ensure that AI is beneficial to humanity. Other areas of work could include biosecurity, nuclear technology, other risks to humanity’s existence or fulfillment of its potential, and the development of tools, institutions, and communities that support these efforts.

About the Role

We are seeking someone to lead efforts to find standout founders for the organizations we intend to help start. We expect that you will:

1. Engage closely with, and possibly contribute to, our research

2. Use that knowledge to identify promising candidates to form the founding teams of the organization ideas we select

3. Reach out to these promising candidates and discuss why founding the identified organization could be a compelling opportunity

4. Play a key role in the ultimate founder evaluation, selection, and funding decisions

5. Help us make founding organizations in partnership with FLF an attractive opportunity for potential founders

We expect that you’ll spend significant time both getting to know the general talent landscape and individuals in our areas of focus, as well as engaging more precisely with the specific talents needed for sometimes highly specialized work.

That said, we’re a new organization and we do not have sufficient expertise in recruitment of this type such that we confidently know what activities are most likely to be successful. We expect that we’ll collaboratively determine how to best accomplish our goals.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to learn about highly technical ideas and represent those accurately and with nuance to others
• Excellent communication ability across a wide-variety of situations and audiences
• Excitement regarding the prospect of focusing your career on recruiting founders to help steer transformative technologies away from existential risk and toward long-term flourishing
• A bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent

Additional Possible Qualifications

• A track-record of highly successful recruitment, particularly with regard to academia and/or technical research
• Experience with the founding of new organizations

Logistics

You will be an employee of the Future of Life Foundation, or our affiliated organization, the Future of Life Institute. Each are 501(c)(3) research non-profits.

• Compensation and Benefits: Compensation for this role could range between $100,000 - $200,000+, depending on expertise and experience, plus full benefits.
• Location: We prefer people who are available to work 2-3 days per week in-person (in Campbell, CA), but we will consider remote candidates, especially those based in other hubs relevant to our work (e.g. London). We hope to be able to sponsor US visas (without going through the visa lottery) for this role, but we expect that the nature of this position makes that more uncertain than for our researcher positions.
• Travel: It is possible that this role could require travel, perhaps even significantly. We’re quite uncertain about this, and it likely depends somewhat on the perspective of the person who fills this position.
• Applying for multiple roles: If interested in one of our researcher roles as well, please apply for each.

Miscellaneous

This role is now open on a rolling basis without a deadline, but we are actively assessing candidates that have already applied and may close the role at any time (potentially not evaluating the more recent applications).

We encourage you to apply even if your background may not seem like a great fit! 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 recruitment@flf.org.

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.