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About the Role

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, public engagement, partnership strategy, and contract negotiations. The role ensures airtight governance, strategically sound partnerships, and freedom from legal or ethical vulnerabilities, coordinating a global safety lab.

Responsibilities

Serve as the operational anchor for the Institute's leadership team, ensuring research, standards, evaluations, and public engagement functions operate with speed, quality, and integrity.
Identify and resolve operational risks (legal, ethical, logistical, or reputational) before they become problems, and develop clear escalation protocols.
Build and continually improve the Institute's operating model, including 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 ultimate 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 the Institute's 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 within two- to three-year windows.
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 and regulatory shifts.
Set the Institute's contracting standards, approval frameworks, and spending authority policies.
Identify legal and contractual risks proactively 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 well 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 to keep the team coordinated and aligned.

Requirements

10–15 years of professional experience in senior operations, strategy, legal affairs, or institutional leadership.
At least five years of experience 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.
Experience in AI policy, technology safety, digital rights, or adjacent fields is preferred.
Sufficient technical fluency to engage credibly with frontier AI companies and standards experts is preferred.
Background in international organizations, global multi-stakeholder initiatives, or cross-jurisdictional policy work is preferred.
Experience supporting a founding executive director or CEO of a startup, institute, or new program at scale is preferred.
Familiarity with standards-setting bodies, benchmarking organizations, or independent research institutes is preferred.
Job offers are made on the condition that the applicant subsequently passes a criminal background check.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered.

Skills

Operations Leadership
Risk Management
Governance
Compliance
Partnership Strategy
Contract Negotiation
Legal Foresight
Cross-Organizational Collaboration
Communication

Location

San Francisco, CA

Work Type

Full Time
In office

Experience Level

Senior leadership
10-15 years professional experience
5+ years overseeing teams

Education Level

Legal training or equivalent experience

Salary/Compensations

$176,000.00 - $209,000.00 Salary/year

Benefits

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

About the Company

Common Sense Media is the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing research-backed information, education, and independent voice. We rate, educate, and advocate for policies to protect and prepare kids online. Our ratings, research, and resources reach over 150 million users globally, 1.4 million educators, and more than 100,000 schools worldwide annually.
As part of Common Sense Media, the Youth AI Safety Institute sets standards, conducts research, and independently tests the AI products children use most.

Equal Opportunity

Common Sense Media provides equal employment opportunities to all qualified individuals and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, age, national origin, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other protected classification or characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.
Common Sense Media will also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.