Workshops and Events Lead

About this role

For the right fit, we're open to compensating at a much higher pay rate.

ABOUT CAMBRIDGE BOSTON ALIGNMENT INITIATIVE

The Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative http://cbai.ai (CBAI) is a nonprofit research organization working to advance research and education directed towards ensuring that society navigates a safe and beneficial transition to advanced AI systems. Our work takes the form of producing original research efforts and accelerating AI safety research through fellowship programs.

Our inaugural summer fellowship cohort has already published a spotlight paper at the Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop at NeurIPS, accepted papers at ICLR, and some of our fellows have joined Goodfire and Redwood Research. After a successful 2025 launch, we're rapidly scaling in 2026. We will host multiple fellowship cycles, double our fellowship cohort, and quadruple our team.

CBAI has been the anchor organization for AI safety in Cambridge since late 2022. We serve as the connective tissue between the AI safety research community across Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern — running workshops, convenings, and networking events that bring together researchers, students, and practitioners working on the most important problems in the field.

Refer us candidates https://airtable.com/app4zWdbexhJgyBwp/pagLKlt1Zh0RV163y/form, and receive $5,000 if we hire them.

THE ROLE

You'll own CBAI's external-facing event and workshop portfolio — the programs that make Cambridge a genuine gathering point for AI safety researchers and that build the field's next generation of talent. This includes three distinct but interconnected responsibilities: scaling and improving the Harvard-MIT AI Safety Workshops held in Essex, MA; running CBAI's monthly city-level networking events; and sourcing, designing, and executing high-visibility specialized research workshops with Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern research groups. This is equal parts community strategy and operational execution — you'll need to be as comfortable designing a workshop curriculum with student group leaders as you are negotiating a venue contract or managing a speaker's travel logistics.

RESPONSIBILITIES

HARVARD-MIT AI SAFETY WORKSHOPS (0.5 FTE)

- Own the end-to-end planning and execution of the Harvard-MIT AI Safety Workshops, currently held 5 times per academic year in Essex, MA, with ~40 participants and ~10 guests per workshop

- Work with the Harvard AI Safety Student Team (AISST) https://aisst.ai and MIT AI Alignment (MAIA) https://aialignment.mit.edu to scale the program from 5 to 8 workshops per academic calendar year

- Curate and invite guests from frontier AI safety research organizations — including Redwood Research, METR, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI's safety teams, and Cambridge-area academics

- Lead participant selection in collaboration with AISST and MAIA, ensuring cohort quality and diversity across partnering university groups

- Design workshop programming: session formats, discussion structures, speaker slots, and career programming

- Gather and synthesize participant and guest feedback to continuously improve workshop quality

SPECIALIZED RESEARCH WORKSHOPS (0.3 FTE)

- Identify and source opportunities for high-visibility, weekend-long specialized research workshops in partnership with Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern research groups

- Build relationships with faculty and research group leads to develop workshop concepts that serve genuine research needs

- Own end-to-end execution: venue, logistics, programming design, speaker coordination, and participant experience

- As the portfolio grows, take on a managerial dimension — coordinating contractors, volunteers, or support staff to run larger events effectively

CITY-LEVEL NETWORKING & COMMUNITY EVENTS (0.2 FTE)

- Own and run CBAI's monthly Cambridge AI safety networking events, serving as the connective tissue between researchers, students, and practitioners across the city

- Curate invitee lists, manage outreach, and create programming that makes each event genuinely worth attending

- Build and maintain CBAI's relationships with the broader Cambridge AI safety community, using events as a vehicle for strengthening the ecosystem

ABOUT YOU

We expect you to be characterized by most of the qualities listed below.

You're an exceptional event producer. You've planned and executed complex, multi-stakeholder events — ideally including residential or multi-day formats — and you take genuine pride in the quality of the experience you create. You anticipate problems before they happen, keep logistics airtight, and remain calm when they don't.

You're a natural community builder. You understand that events are a means, not an end. You think about what makes a community worth belonging to, who should be in the room and why and how to design experiences that strengthen relationships and generate real intellectual value — not just fill a calendar.

You're a credible interlocutor in research spaces. Familiarity with AI safety research is a strong plus for this role. You don't need to be a researcher, but you need enough fluency to hold a substantive conversation with a safety researcher at Anthropic, understand why a particular workshop topic matters, and make good curatorial judgments about guests and programming. Candidates with meaningful AI safety familiarity will be strongly preferred.

You're an excellent relationship builder. A significant part of this role is maintaining trust with student group leaders at Harvard and MIT, researchers at frontier labs, and faculty across multiple universities. You know how to build those relationships thoughtfully and keep them warm over time.

Operationally excellent. You manage vendors, timelines, budgets, and logistics without dropping things. You build systems and documentation that make each successive event easier to run than the last.

Excellent communicator. You write clearly, represent CBAI well to ex

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