Managing Director, AI for Impact

Robin Hood Foundation • New York, NY

1d • $190,000 - $240,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Robin Hood is seeking a Managing Director, AI for Impact to lead its "AI for impact" strategy. This new position aims to leverage AI to accelerate solutions and scale effective approaches in areas like education, health, and skills training, while mitigating risks of deepening inequality. The role requires strong AI fluency and technology product experience, with a focus on strategic opportunities and understanding technology project success factors. The Managing Director will report to the Chief Program & Impact Officer, responsible for strengthening AI grantmaking, building partnerships for funding, and expanding Robin Hood's contributions to the field of AI and upward economic mobility. This role also serves as a senior advisor on AI strategy internally, working with other leaders to ensure a consistent and principled approach to AI adoption. The position directly oversees Blue Ridge Labs @ Robin Hood, an internal venture studio and funding vehicle for tech-enabled solutions addressing poverty.

Robin Hood has a history of funding technology-enabled solutions, including through Blue Ridge Labs, which has incubated successful digital-first organizations. The organization has also supported technology innovations like edtech products and digital benefits access tools, and has recently launched a Learning + Technology Fund, hosted AI x Opportunity Summits, ran a national AI Poverty Challenge, and developed AI capacity building support for community partners. Robin Hood also has dedicated internal IT and Business Intelligence teams, and a Partnerships team that engages with the technology community.

The Managing Director, AI for Impact will build upon these existing assets, ensuring a sharp, coherent, and forward-thinking approach to both external programmatic work and internal AI efforts. The role is not intended to consolidate all AI work but to provide strategic direction. The Managing Director is expected to bring technical sophistication and relationships in the AI and technology community, serving as a resource to program teams rather than holding domain expertise across all areas. Most AI-related grant decisions will remain with program teams who hold budget authority. The exception is Blue Ridge Labs, which the Managing Director directly oversees and has its own budget. Overall, the role will collaborate across departments and the network to enhance Robin Hood's technology orientation, capabilities, and poverty-fighting impact. This role offers an opportunity to make a significant impact for New Yorkers by connecting technology with public purpose.

Requirements

• Delivery experience in public-interest or civic technology. You have built, shipped, or led technology work in a mission-driven, government, or community context - and you understand the translation required between technologists and the people who deliver and receive services, and the constrained-resource reality of nonprofits.
• Standing and relationships in the civic-tech ecosystem. You are known and trusted in the world of public-interest technology, and you can open doors to funders, tech firms, government, and peer organizations.
• AI and technology fluency. You use AI tools natively in your own day-to-day work, and are conversant enough in modern AI systems to understand their practical capabilities and limitations, to assess opportunities realistically, and to know when to draw on deeper technical specialists. You bring strong instincts for what's worth building and how to connect technology’s potential to Robin Hood’s mission. You do not need to be a machine-learning engineer.
• Judgment about impact. You can recognize meaningful, 'tech-shaped' social-impact opportunities and distinguish them from novelty; you are comfortable with evidence, measurement, and the discipline of asking whether an intervention actually helps.
• Leadership through influence and management. You can manage a senior leader directly and, just as importantly, move work forward across teams you do not manage, through credibility and collaboration. This role is deliberately designed with a small direct span; your leverage is relational.
• Commitment to equity and to the communities we serve. You believe AI must be shaped with people experiencing poverty, and you center their voices in your work.
• Integrative, systems-level thinking. You understand that AI strategy works best woven through an organization's core approach, not as a silo, and you know how to make that integration real, both within Robin Hood and across grantee organizations and the wider ecosystem.

Nice To Haves

• Grantmaking or philanthropy fluency is a plus, or the judgment and curiosity to acquire it quickly.

Responsibilities

• Own Robin Hood's strategy for supporting AI that advances economic mobility - identifying where AI and digital tools can help more New Yorkers reach mobility milestones, and where AI disruptions risk causing harm.
• Engage across Program teams, Management Acceleration, and Public Policy, ensuring AI-related grantmaking is coordinated, evidence-based, and consistent with Robin Hood's benefit/cost discipline and standards for measurable results.
• Prioritize among the many demands on our attention, guarding against the risk that resources flow to work that sounds innovative but lacks real potential to help low-income communities.
• Navigate the tensions inherent in AI strategy, weighing AI's potential to improve how organizations and systems serve people against the risks it poses, and help Robin Hood manage tensions and tradeoffs with thoughtfulness, rigor, and judgment.
• Serve as a credible, senior presence in the civic and public-interest technology world, building and stewarding relationships with technologists, funders, tech firms, government, and mission-driven organizations.
• Proactively develop and stay involved in all of Robin Hood's AI-related strategy and partnerships, including teaming with technology companies, co-funders, and donors to Robin Hood, and working closely across our programmatic and development teams to support fundraising efforts with AI and technology companies.
• Cultivate the ecosystem: bring people together through communities of practice and larger convenings such as the AI x Opportunity Summit, and strengthen connections across sectors.
• Oversee Blue Ridge Labs, supporting BRL as a distinct venture and innovation engine, setting direction and aligning its work with Robin Hood's broader AI strategy, while the Director of BRL runs the day-to-day operations and owns results.
• Steward Robin Hood's technical credibility. Robin Hood's technical capacity - business intelligence, data, and IT - sits with the technology team overseen by the Chief Financial & Operations Officer and supports every department. You partner closely with that team to ensure our internal and external AI efforts share a consistent approach and set of principles, serving as their strategic counterpart on AI strategy while they retain ownership of internal delivery, tools, and infrastructure. You are also their strategic counterpart for mission-facing AI questions, and you curate an external advisory bench of tech specialists, so that program staff can assess AI tools and partners well.
• Support decision-making for AI-related grants across Program & Impact teams, serving as connective tissue and a source of guidance, not a bottleneck to decisions.
• Be accountable for putting Robin Hood's Responsible AI principles into practice - keeping people at the center, grounding decisions in evidence and human judgment, advancing equity and mitigating bias, protecting the communities we serve, and sharing what we learn.
• Ensure the perspectives of people with lived experience of poverty help shape the technology solutions Robin Hood supports.
• Capture and disseminate lessons - including honest reflection on what is not working - to help Robin Hood and the broader field adopt AI in ways that are ethical, effective, and aligned with reducing poverty.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Employer-paid covered dental and vision insurance
• Employer-paid life and long-term disability insurance, plus employer-paid Paid Family Leave premiums
• 403(b) retirement plan with employer match, and a 12% employer contribution to a 401(a) retirement plan
• Employer contributions to Health Spending Account (must be enrolled into the High-Deductible Health Plan)
• Pre-tax flexible spending account (FSA) for health care and dependent care expenses
• Paid time off, including 20 days of accrued PTO (prorated for new hires), plus a separate Sick and Safe Leave bank in accordance with NYC's Earned Safe and Sick Time Act
• Paid Parental Leave and NYS Paid Family Leave

What This Job Offers

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