Operations Associate

[WANT A SINGLE JOB TO SERVE MANY AI SAFETY PROJECTS? ASHGRO IS HIRING AN OPERATIONS ASSOCIATE]

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Applications are closed.

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WHAT IS ASHGRO?

https://www.ashgro.org/

Ashgro helps AI safety projects focus on AI safety.

We offer fiscal sponsorship to AI safety projects, saving them time and allowing them to access more funding. We save them time by handling accounting, management of grants and expenses, and HR. We allow them access to more funding by housing them within a 501(c)(3) public charity (Ashgro Inc.), which can receive grants from pretty much any source.

Search for ‘Ashgro’ in https://survivalandflourishing.fund/2025/recommendations to find examples of projects we're sponsoring.

WHAT DOES AN OPERATIONS ASSOCIATE DO AT ASHGRO?

Handle parts of tickets, whole tickets and eventually address just generally described opportunities or problems. You'll start out doing very basic tasks, but we aim to move you up the ladder to more and more complicated or open-ended tasks as quickly as we (and you) can. Given that we're a small team, though, some share of very basic tasks will remain your responsibility for the foreseeable future.

Examples of very basic tasks:

• Create tickets, link them to existing tickets and add forms to them.

• Fill details into an email template and send the email.

• Upload an invoice to a procurement platform every month.

• Transfer money to prize recipients.

Examples of well-defined tasks:

• Put together invoices and send them to the UK government.

• Respond to a fiscal sponsorship inquiry.

• Advise project staff on what expenses are allowed or not allowed.

• Review expenses for compliance.

• Ask our lawyer for legal advice and implement it.

Examples of high-level work:

• Create and document processes.

• Figure out how to handle tax withholding for prize payments and communicate about it with project staff.

• Understand why we're not getting deposits from a set of grants and figure out how to get that unstuck. Including finding a solution, together with the affected project staff, for the cash flow problem resulting from the grant conditions.

All of the above are past examples. Future work will be different.

REQUIREMENTS

You need to be able to:

• Communicate externally.
• Read with attention to detail. In particular, you can read a customer request and understand what it is they want.
• Write clearly, in a friendly manner and quickly (since you'll have to do a lot of writing).

• Do stuff.
• Prioritize well after being given heuristics for prioritization.
• Stick to the given process, even when it's not perfectly optimal.
• Handle similar things in a similar way (consistency) (when there is no process or there are gaps in the process).
• Learn new things quickly (or already know everything).

• Communicate internally.
• Recognize when you don't know something and ask.
• Recognize when something comes up that someone else (in particular, your manager) should know and tell them about it.

Nice to have – lacking these should not (!) stop you from applying:

• Legal or financial background.

• Experience working at a US non-profit.

• Knowledge of AI safety topics.

• A knack for building rapport through written communication.

APPLICATION PROCESS

AI warning: We want to know what you can do, not what AI can do. So as soon as we have any suspicion that any part of your application is written by AI, we will put it on the ‘maybe’ pile. If we are reasonably sure that part of the application was written by AI, we will reject it, no matter how good it otherwise seems.

• Initial two-part application, which doubles as a work sample test. – What you submit here will be anonymized before review.

• 30 min screening interview involving a small sample task.

• 1-2 h interview with future manager (Richard).

• 1-2 h interview with CEO/skip manager (JJ).

• 2-3 h screenshare call working with future manager on actual work tasks.