Research Manager — Cooperative Oversight

Compensation

USD 230,000-330,000 base · sabbatical accrual + 1,200 H100-hour/quarter research-dividend equivalent. Note: alphabell does not have a traditional management hierarchy — this role's authority is convening rather than directive (see /governance).

What you'll do

• Set lebesgue-22's research agenda in collaboration with the cell's contributors. Convene rather than direct — the lab's structural commitment to cell autonomy makes 'manager' an unusual title here.
• Lead the Constellation partnership work from the alphabell side, including the joint methodology paper on disagreement handling under organisational boundaries.
• Represent the lab on the External Evaluation Cooperative as one of the two designated lab representatives. The Cooperative is the lab's most consequential cross-organisation relationship and the representation is non-trivial.
• Drive debate-plus-trace v2 to publication: extending the protocol to agents operating against evaluators with up to 10× capability asymmetry, in collaboration with Hiroshi Tanigawa and Ifeoma Nwosu-Howard.
• Take over coordination of the cooperative-membership-functions work and its substrate-level integration with the agentic axis.
• Mentor postdocs and cohort members rotating through lebesgue-22. Cell stewardship at alphabell is mostly invisible plumbing; you will be doing a lot of it.
• Co-author 3-5 cell-published reports per year and present at NeurIPS / ICLR / AISI public workshops as the cell's most public-facing voice.

What we look for

Must-haves

• PhD or equivalent industry experience in interpretability, alignment, scalable oversight, or a closely related area.
• Strong publication record — at minimum five substantive papers as first or senior author, with at least two cited in the operative interpretability/oversight literature.
• Demonstrated capacity to lead a small research group (cell-equivalent of 3-7 researchers).
• Capacity to represent the lab at public venues without straying from its structural commitments — neither over-promising nor under-stating what the lab does.
• Comfort with the convening-rather-than-directive style of leadership at alphabell. If you are looking for a role with traditional managerial authority, this is the wrong one.
• Willingness to spend most of your time at the Tel Aviv anchor.

Nice-to-haves

• Prior experience leading a cross-organisational research partnership.
• Public writing on AI safety policy or the institutional design of AI research.
• Familiarity with the lab's existing oversight publications: 25/12 (scalable oversight), 26/01 (cooperative membership functions), 25/01 (verifiable policies).
• Existing relationships with the External Evaluation Cooperative member labs.
• Reading proficiency in Hebrew welcome but not required.

What we offer

• Relocation support — for roles that involve moving anchor or country, the lab covers reasonable relocation costs (movers, short-term accommodation up to 8 weeks, and a one-time settlement allowance). The standard relocation package is documented and rate-equalised; we do not negotiate it individually.
• Visa sponsorship — where the residency country and role warrant it, the lab sponsors work visas and (for long-tenured roles) supports the pathway to permanent residency. Visa work is shepherded by the relevant anchor steward, not outsourced to a third-party HR firm.
• Parental leave — 26 weeks fully paid for birthing parents, 16 weeks fully paid for non-birthing parents, with a phased return-to-work option. This is independent of country of residence and is one of the lab-wide compensation policies that is not negotiable.
• Sabbatical — every contributor accrues sabbatical time from year one; full-time contributors at the 36-month tenure mark are eligible for a 12-week paid sabbatical, with a longer 24-week option at 72 months. Sabbaticals are taken; we monitor.
• Compute allowance — every full-time research role carries an associated research-dividend H100-hour quarterly allowance, allocated through the federated scheduler under the standard mechanism. The allowance is in addition to your cell's pooled compute and is yours to direct.
• Conference and travel budget — USD 12,000-18,000 per year (role-dependent) for attendance at NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML / AAMAS / CAV / POPL / AISI workshops, plus an additional invited-talks allowance covered independently.
• Sustainable workload — explicitly anti-burnout — the lab tracks contributor working hours (self-reported, monthly) and treats sustained overage as a structural problem to be addressed at the cell-steward or anchor-steward level rather than a virtue to be celebrated. We have data on which cells push their members hardest and we act on it. Vote-of-record contributors have the standing to flag burnout patterns in their own or adjacent cells.
• Equipment — laptop of your choice, an ergonomic workstation, and a contributor allowance for the secondary equipment you'll inevitably need.

How to apply

Send your application to apply@alphabell.com. We respond to every application; we do not use applicant-tracking automation that ignores submissions.

Required:

• A CV or résumé covering your research and engineering trajectory, including specific roles and the substantive technical work in each.
• Two short pieces of public writing in the style of an Alignment Forum post or an alphabell internal-index report (800-1,500 words each). These should be on AI safety topics; we are looking for evidence of substantive thinking under conditions where the answer is not yet clear. If you have prior public writing that fits, send links instead of new writing.
• A 1-page research proposal scoped to the role you are applying for, naming the cell(s) you would want to work with and the specific question you would want to take on in the first 12 months. Proposals do not need to be definitive — we revise these together once we start talking — but they need to be concrete.

For PhD and postdoctoral roles, also include two references; we will reach out to them after the second interview round.

We typically respond within four weeks. Our interview process — for non-PhD roles — has three stages: a written exchange about the proposal, a 90-minute substantive conversation with the host cell, and a final meeting with the relevant axis steward. We do not whiteboard-code; we do not do leetcode-style interviews; we do not run timed take-home tests.

Equal opportunity

Equal opportunity statement. alphabell is committed to a contributor pool that is broad in background, country of residence, training history, and structural perspective. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, national or ethnic origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or parenthood status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We actively seek applicants from communities under-represented in AI safety research, and we treat the structural commitments described in our research conduct charter — including those bearing on dual-use research and paired interpretability — as applying equally to every contributor regardless of background. The lab's anchor stewards and the long-tenured contributor pool review hiring and onboarding patterns quarterly; substantive disparities are treated as governance items rather than as HR statistics. If you require accommodation in the application or interview process, please indicate this in your initial email; the request will be handled by the anchor steward responsible for the role rather than by an outsourced HR function.

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