Head of Operations, Youth AI Safety Institute

COMMON SENSE MEDIA • San Francisco, CA

13d • $176,000 - $209,000 • Onsite

About The Position

The Head of Operations is the Executive Director's closest operational partner, ensuring the Youth AI Safety Institute functions with integrity, efficiency, and strategic foresight. This senior leadership role spans fiduciary oversight, governance compliance, standards execution, partnership strategy, and contract negotiations. The role ensures airtight governance, strategically sound partnerships, freedom from legal or ethical vulnerabilities, and the coherence required of a global safety lab. The Head of Operations acts as the connective tissue, linking the internal team, Common Sense Media's shared functions, and external partners. This role is for a senior leader experienced at the intersection of strategy and execution, capable of anticipating problems and building systems that support the Executive Director. The Head of Operations will oversee the Operations team and represent the Institute with Common Sense Media's executive leadership, legal, finance, development, and product and engineering teams.

Requirements

• 10–15 years of professional experience in senior operations, strategy, legal affairs, or institutional leadership.
• At least five years at a level overseeing teams and cross-organizational relationships.
• Demonstrated experience operating at the intersection of strategy and execution in a mission-driven, research, or standards-setting context.
• Track record of building and managing complex, multi-stakeholder partnerships, including negotiating and structuring significant contracts and agreements.
• Experience overseeing governance and compliance functions, including conflict-of-interest management, grant compliance, or regulatory adherence in a nonprofit or research institution.
• Legal training or equivalent experience working closely with legal counsel on governance design, contract review, and compliance frameworks.
• Exceptional judgment: able to identify risk early, make sound decisions under uncertainty, and know when to escalate.
• Senior-level written and verbal communication skills; able to represent the Institute credibly in high-stakes conversations with funders, government officials, international partners, and industry leaders.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in AI policy, technology safety, digital rights, or adjacent fields, with sufficient technical fluency to engage credibly with frontier AI companies and standards experts.
• Background in international organizations, global multi-stakeholder initiatives, or cross-jurisdictional policy work.
• Experience supporting a founding executive director or CEO of a startup, institute, or new program at scale.
• Familiarity with standards-setting bodies, benchmarking organizations, or independent research institutes.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the operational anchor for the Institute's leadership team, ensuring research, standards, evaluations, and public engagement functions have necessary resources for speed, quality, and integrity.
• Identify and resolve operational risks (legal, ethical, logistical, reputational) and develop escalation protocols.
• Build and improve the Institute's operating model: organizational processes, cross-functional workflows, decision-making frameworks, and accountability systems.
• Oversee the Operations team in setting direction, removing blockers, and ensuring coordination across cross-organizational functions.
• Hold responsibility for the Institute's governance infrastructure, ensuring policies, conflict-of-interest procedures, and safeguards are in place and enforced.
• Oversee funder compliance across philanthropic and industry relationships, ensuring grant obligations and reporting requirements are met.
• Oversee the Institute's approach to formal complaints, methodological challenges, and legal inquiries, working with legal counsel.
• Cultivate strategic partnerships at a senior level with academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, standards bodies, and international agencies.
• Identify future organizational and relationship needs for the Institute (two- to three-year windows) and begin building those relationships.
• Represent the Institute in high-stakes partnership conversations and negotiations.
• Support the Executive Director in cultivating relationships with key philanthropic and industry funders and coalition partners.
• Oversee all significant contract negotiations with evaluation partners, academic collaborators, technology vendors, and international organizations.
• Apply strategic foresight to contract design, ensuring agreements accommodate industry evolution.
• Set the Institute's contracting standards, approval frameworks, and spending authority policies.
• Proactively identify legal and contractual risks (IP ownership, liability, data use, publication rights) and work with legal counsel to address them.
• Serve as the primary operational liaison between the Institute and Common Sense Media's shared services (finance, legal, HR, communications, development, product and engineering, marketing).
• Ensure the Institute's work is visible and understood across Common Sense Media, fostering internal collaboration.
• Represent the Institute's operational interests in Common Sense Media leadership forums and planning processes.
• Build internal culture and communication rhythms (team meetings, syncs, project tracking, reporting) to keep the team coordinated.

Benefits

• Competitive nonprofit compensation
• Comprehensive benefits
• A collaborative, flexible work environment
• Meaningful access to the Institute's leadership and the broader Common Sense Media organization

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed