(Senior) Program Manager, Mentor Selection

About The Organization

MATS Research aims to find and train talented individuals for what we see as the world's most urgent and talent-constrained problem: reducing risks from advanced artificial intelligence. Our mission is to solve the talent bottleneck in AI safety and security through training, credentials, and community. We believe that ambitious researchers from a variety of backgrounds have the potential to contribute to the fields of AI alignment, interpretability, governance, and security research. Through our research fellowship, we aim to provide the mentorship, financial support, and community necessary to aid this transition. Please see our website for more details.

The Role

MATS is one of the largest talent pipelines in AI safety & security (~300 fellows per year and growing), and determining which mentors we support is one of the most consequential decisions we make. As the Program Manager for Mentor Selection, you will own that decision process end-to-end: sourcing and headhunting promising mentors, gathering evaluations from our Mentor Selection Committee, advisors, and team members, weighing evidence from past cohorts, and allocating our support across mentors and research agendas — subject to approval from MATS leadership.

This is a role for someone with genuine taste about AI safety research and the people doing it. You will be the key point of contact with mentors at organizations like Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Apollo, METR, and Redwood; you will engage deeply with the research landscape (e.g. should we support more AI control or agent foundations work on the margin? How should we allocate between empirical work on existing models, governance work, and more theoretical work?); and you will work alongside our impact analysis and admissions functions on one of the field's most deliberate approaches to talent allocation. This role has similarities to grantmaking roles at nonprofit foundations, in that you will need to form impact-based opinions about our relative support of different research agendas.

Who We're Looking For

We welcome applications from people with deep AI safety context and strong judgment about research and researchers. You might be:

• A grantmaker or program officer who has prioritized between funding opportunities in AI safety or an adjacent field
• A researcher (e.g., PhD or equivalent experience) with broad familiarity with AI safety agendas and a strong network across the ecosystem
• A field-builder or talent-program lead who has sourced and evaluated senior technical or policy talent

If you don't match one of these profiles but can otherwise demonstrate that you'll excel in this role, we still encourage you to apply!

Key Responsibilities

• Own the MATS mentor selection process, run once per cohort (3–4 times per year): sourcing, evaluation, allocation, and offers
• Headhunt and conduct outreach to prospective mentors, drawing on your network and knowledge of the field
• Design and run our information collection from the Mentor Selection Committee and advisors, working with our systems team on the supporting interfaces
• Evaluate returning mentors using data from past cohorts (fellow ratings, research and career outcomes, mentor engagement)
• Propose fellow allocations across mentors and research agendas, balancing mentor strength, agenda importance, portfolio strategy, and value of information; iterate with and secure approval from MATS leadership
• Help manage mentor relationships through the cycle, including fellow capacity reallocation as mentors' plans change and our resource constraints (funding, office, housing, research management capacity) evolve
• Between cycles: engage deeply with AI safety research directions, represent MATS at conferences, and contribute to impact analysis and talent-allocation strategy
• Report to the Program Director (Juan Gil).

Essential Qualifications and Skills

• High familiarity with the AI safety & security research landscape, its organizations, and its researchers
• Excellent judgment about research quality and researcher potential ("research taste")
• Strong network in AI safety, or a demonstrated ability to quickly build one
• Clear, warm, and proactive communication with senior stakeholders
• Ability to weigh many qualitative and quantitative inputs into a defensible decision
• Strong understanding of and alignment with our mission of reducing risk from the development of advanced AI

Desirable Qualifications and Skills

We expect especially strong applicants to have deep experience in at least one of the following areas:

• Grantmaking, program-officer, or research-funding prioritization experience
• A PhD or comparable research experience in a field relevant to AI safety
• Talent identification: headhunting, scouting, or selection for competitive technical programs
• Project management of multi-stakeholder processes on fixed timelines

What We Offer

• High-leverage opportunity to shape which research and researchers the AI safety & security field grows around
• Professional development and skill enhancement opportunities
• Collaborative and intellectually stimulating work environment
• Competitive salary (see below)
• Access to our office spaces in Berkeley, London, and other partnered office spaces
• Medical insurance, including dental, vision, and life insurance
• Traditional and Roth 401(k) options
• Visa support for excellent candidates
• Meals provided Monday-Friday

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Compensation

We expect to pay between $150,00 and $180,000 for this role. The exact figure depends on your experience and where you're based.

Working hours and location

40 hours per week. Successful candidates can expect to spend most of their time working in-person from our main office in Berkeley, California. We are open to alternative working arrangements for exceptional candidates.

How to Apply

Please fill out the form here. If you use an LLM chatbot or other AI tools in this application, please follow these norms. Parts of our process ask you not to use AI so we can assess baseline strength; later stages actively encourage AI tools.

Applications will be open from approximately September 4 through September 21. The anticipated start date for this role is no later than December 1, 2026, though preference will be given to candidates who can start sooner. We can make exceptions for great candidates.

Join us in shaping the future of AI safety & security research!