Community Lead

FAR.AI; West Virginia; On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

FAR.AI in Berkeley, CA seeks a Community Lead to strengthen the global AI safety community by connecting researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. You will shape FAR.AI's community strategy, identify impact opportunities, and drive collaborations beyond events.

You will grow FAR.Labs and the Bay Area presence, manage the Community Manager, and coordinate with Futures, Research, and Communications to scale engagement and practical outcomes in AI safety research.

Qualifications

• Familiarity with the AI safety field.
• Experience building communities or networks.
• Strong relationships and credibility within the AI safety community.
• Strategic judgment to identify high-value opportunities.
• Strategic leadership and people management abilities.
• Strong communication skills to translate field insights into plans.
• Bay Area presence with willingness to engage locally.

Responsibilities

• Set community strategy and priorities to maximize impact.
• Build relationships with researchers, practitioners, organizations, and policymakers across geographies.
• Create sustained engagement beyond events through varied formats and programs.
• Lead programming and connect FAR.Labs to the wider AI safety community, coordinating with Futures and other teams.

Skills

AI safety familiarity

Community building

Relationship building

Strategic judgment

People management

Communication skills

Bay Area presence

Job description

About Us

FAR.AI is a non-profit AI research institute working to ensure advanced AI is safe and beneficial for everyone. Our mission is to facilitate breakthrough AI safety research, advance global understanding of AI risks and solutions, and foster a coordinated global response.
Since our founding in July 2022, we've grown to 50+ staff, published 40+ academic papers, and convened leading AI safety events. Our work is recognized globally, with publications at premier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML including a Best Paper Honorable Mention in 2026, and ICLR, and features in the Financial Times, Nature News, Wired Magazine and MIT Technology Review. We conduct pre-deployment testing on behalf of frontier developers such as OpenAI, independent evaluations for governments including the EU AI Office, and publish the AI Security Leaderboard based on our red-teaming expertise. We help steer and grow the AI safety field through developing research roadmaps with renowned researchers such as Yoshua Bengio; running FAR.Labs, an AI safety-focused co-working space in Berkeley housing 40+ members; and supporting the community through targeted grants to technical researchers.

About the role

FAR.AI engages a wide range of people working to make AI safer and more beneficial to society, from researchers and frontier AI developers to policymakers and government agencies. Through our global events, FAR.Labs community space, research collaborations, and safety testing engagements, we bring together people working on some of the field's most important challenges. But these relationships and activities can be fragmented. People working on similar problems don't always connect, and promising ideas and collaborations don't always progress beyond individual engagements.

We're looking for a Community Lead to help close these gaps and build a stronger, more connected global AI safety community. You'll shape FAR.AI's community strategy, identifying where we can have the greatest impact, setting priorities, and developing approaches that turn relationships into meaningful collaborations and greater adoption of important safety research.

You will build on FAR.AI's established Bay Area community and global network, strengthening relationships across organizations and geographies. This means understanding who we should engage, creating opportunities for people to connect and collaborate, and ensuring promising relationships and ideas are supported beyond individual events and programs.

You will own FAR.AI's overarching community strategy and work closely with the Futures, Research, and Communications teams to put it into practice. You'll also manage our existing Community Manager, who leads day-to-day programming at FAR.Labs and supports our local Bay Area community.

Success in this role means building a community that advances AI safety through sustained relationships, productive collaborations, and real-world impact, rather than simply increasing participation or the number of events we run.

You will report to the Head of Programs.

What you’ll do

Set community strategy and priorities

• Develop and own FAR.AI’s community strategy and theory of change, identifying where community-building can have the greatest impact.
• Map the ecosystem to identify gaps, emerging opportunities, and unmet needs.
• Translate these insights into clear priorities, experiments, and measures of success.

Build relationships and facilitate collaboration

• Build relationships with researchers, practitioners, technical organizations, academics, entrepreneurs, funders, policymakers, and community leaders across organizations and geographies.
• Represent FAR.AI at relevant conferences, workshops, and community gatherings, working with the Community Manager and Futures leadership to identify priority events, key relationships, and desired outcomes for each.
• Facilitate introductions and help promising connections develop into collaborations, mentorships, and partnerships.

Create sustained engagement beyond events

• Develop ways for people to stay connected between major convenings and beyond their initial interactions with FAR.AI.
• Experiment with formats such as small-group discussions, virtual gatherings, curated content, and research visits.
• Identify high-impact follow-on opportunities for FAR.AI Futures to support directly and/or collaborate with other organizations in the ecosystem to take forward.
• Evaluate which approaches create lasting value and adapt programming accordingly.

Lead community programming and connect FAR.Labs to the wider field

• Translate community priorities into a focused programming portfolio aligned with FAR.AI’s broader goals.
• Manage and develop FAR.AI’s Community Manager, setting clear priorities and ensuring Bay Area programming aligns with and advances the broader community strategy.
• Coordinate with FAR.Labs/Ops to support local programming, visiting researchers, and effective use of the physical space.
• Build an understanding of existing ownership and responsibilities across Community, FAR.Labs/Ops, and Futures, identify gaps and opportunities for improvement, and recommend future resource and capacity needs.

Must-have

• Familiarity with the AI safety field. You understand its research landscape, major organizations, key people, and evolving priorities, and can engage credibly with researchers and practitioners.
• Experience building communities or networks. You have demonstrated an ability to bring people together around shared interests or goals and create the conditions for relationships and collaborations to flourish.
• Strong relationships and credibility. You have established trusted relationships within the AI safety community and the ability to build new ones across organizations, geographies, and areas of work.
• Strategic judgment. You can identify high-value opportunities, recognize gaps in the field, and make sound decisions about where community-building efforts are most likely to create impact.
• Strategic leadership and people management. You can set direction, establish priorities, delegate effectively, and help a team member grow and succeed.
• Strong communication skills. You can synthesize what you learn from the field into clear insights, recommendations, and plans.
• Bay Area presence. You are willing to spend meaningful time at FAR.Labs and participate in local community activities, with flexibility for travel and occasional evening events.

Nice-to-have

• Research experience or graduate-level training in AI safety, machine learning, computer science, or a related discipline.
• Experience designing and running seminars, workshops, research visits, or small-group discussions that foster substantive exchange.
• Experience working across research, industry, policy, and philanthropy, with an understanding of how these sectors can collaborate to advance AI safety.

Logistics

You will be a full-time employee of FAR.AI, a 501(c)(3) research non-profit.

Location: Berkeley, CA, with regular in-person presence at FAR.Labs and flexibility for travel.
Hours: Full-time (40 hours/week), with occasional evening events.

Travel Requirements: Ability to travel up to 20% of the time, as needed.

Work Authorization: Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Visa sponsorship may be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Hiring process: A phone screen and/or short call with the hiring manager, a paid task test, in-depth interviews with the team, followed by reference checks.