Location: San Francisco, CA (on-site 5 days/week)
About The Center for AI Safety (CAIS)
The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a leading research and advocacy organization focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. Some of our past achievements include: releasing the most widely used measure of AI capabilities used by all major AI companies, running a large compute cluster to facilitate AI safety research which has been cited over 16,000 times, and publishing a global statement on AI Risk signed by Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and top AI CEOs.
The Role
We're looking for a technical, builder-oriented Product Manager who can take full ownership of developing an agentic product. You'll get fluent in the problem space quickly, define the roadmap, prioritize ruthlessly, and drive execution end to end with appropriate iterating.
This isn't a spec-and-handoff role. You'll be expected to build and dig into the product itself, develop and modify directly with the underlying agentic architecture, and use AI coding tools (Claude Code or similar) as part of your own daily workflow, not just something you direct engineers to do. We're moving at the pace of a fast-scaling, well-funded early-stage company, so you should be comfortable with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and owning outcomes across a range of starting points.
What You'll Do
- Take ownership of an agentic product need, whether that means getting up to speed on existing work quickly or defining and building something from scratch.
- Define the go-forward product roadmap and prioritize what gets built next, cutting scope where needed, and manage tradeoffs across projects with varying levels of technical complexity.
- Drive execution of the roadmap and constantly iterate based on user feedback, usage data, and testing, rather than treating launches as one-and-done.
- Rapidly prototype and validate product changes using AI-assisted coding tools before committing further engineering resources.
- Partner cross-functionally (researchers, operations, and external partners) to ship and iterate quickly.
- Conduct user research and discovery directly with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Own metrics and outcomes for your product area; use experimentation to validate decisions.
- Represent the user: demos, briefings, and customer-facing conversations as needed.
What We're Looking For
- 3–5 years of Product Management experience, ideally on technical products, dev tools, or AI-driven features.
- Prior hands-on coding/engineering experience (you've shipped code before moving into PM, or you continue to code informally as part of your workflow).
- Fluency with modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar agentic coding assistants), comfortable using them to prototype, debug, and validate ideas quickly ("vibe coding" is part of your process, not a foreign concept).
- Strong technical fluency: operator-level comfort with SQL, Python, APIs, notebooks, or Git is a plus.
- Track record of writing clear PRDs and requirements, and shipping products from 0→1 or scaling existing ones.
- Excellent judgment on when to build vs. validate first; comfortable operating in ambiguity.
- Equally comfortable stepping into a product you didn't originally build and getting fluent fast, or starting from a blank slate and defining the product from zero.
- Able to move at the pace of a fast-scaling, well-funded early-stage company: fast decisions, frequent re-prioritization, high ownership.
- Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
- Genuine interest in AI safety and CAIS's mission; motivated by getting this technology right, not just by shipping product.
Nice to Have
- Experience in dev tools, ML/AI infrastructure, or platforms used by technical personas (engineers, data scientists).
- Familiarity with agent-based or LLM-powered development workflows (orchestration, prompt iteration, evals).
- Startup experience at early stage (50+ person) companies.
Salary Range
$170,000 - $220,000 annually, depending on experience.
Benefits
- Health insurance for you and your dependents
- 401K plan + 4% matching
- Unlimited PTO
- Lunch and dinner at the office
- Annual Professional Development Stipend
- Access to some of the top talent working on technical and conceptual research in AI safety
Referral Program
Know someone who could be a great fit for this role? Submit their details through our Referral Form. If we end up hiring your referral, you’ll receive a $1,500 bonus once they’ve been with CAIS for 90 days.
Equal Opportunity Employer
The Center for AI Safety is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, medical condition, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. In alignment with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.
If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please contact
[email protected].
We value diversity and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.