Researcher, Policy

About the Role

At Thinking Machines, we believe the future worth building is human. Achieving this is both a technical and governance question. We’re looking for policy researchers to help us understand what policies might be required to build this future as AI advances.

Many AI policy research to date assumes a centralized technical paradigm with humans out of the loop. Our approach may require novel policy thinking; research in this direction is nascent, and we intend to lead it.

In this role, you’ll help create our policy research agenda, understand the novel impacts and challenges of our technical direction, and turn promising ideas into concrete policy frameworks and experiments that can be used by our technical teams and the industry more broadly. You’ll work closely with the broader policy research ecosystem to understand the implications of our vision for the future of AI and to research proposals that enable our mission.

This may be a good fit if you are a researcher who thinks across technology, policy, economics, and safety, and can generate novel proposals that span them.

What You’ll Do

• Develop our policy research agenda in collaboration with leadership and technical teams. This will include a focus on open-weight models, customization, and human-AI collaboration.
• Help set our views proactively on a variety of policy topics, including long-term safety, societal impacts, and future legislation.
• Analyze existing AI policy proposals to identify the gaps we are best positioned to fill.
• Produce internal and public-facing policy research that introduces new frameworks and gives others a foundation to build on.
• Build relationships with think tanks, policy organizations, and academic AI governance communities.
• Design external research partnerships, including commissioned research, grants programs, or convenings.

Minimum qualifications

• Experience conducting original research on AI governance, technology policy, economics, political economy, emerging technology, or another field relevant to the societal impacts of AI.
• Ability to work with technical researchers and translate between technical details, societal impacts, and policy design.
• A degree in history, politics, economics, international affairs, artificial intelligence, or a related discipline.
• Clarity in communication, with an ability to explain complex governance topics to audiences with low context.
• Comfort operating under uncertainty and developing views on questions where there may be little established literature or consensus.

Preferred qualifications - we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all preferred qualifications:

• Authored independent publications (e.g. magazines, Substacks) that generated significant discourse in the AI governance community.
• A deep technical understanding of AI, which informs your governance thinking.
• Ability to run experiments with quantitative components, e.g. economic models.
• Experience collaborating across academic, industry, and nonprofit policy communities.
• Worked on open weights safety or policy.

Logistics

• Location: This role is based in San Francisco, California.
• Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $240,000 - $360,000 USD.
• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas. While we can't guarantee success for every candidate or role, if you're the right fit, we're committed to working through the visa process together.
• Benefits: Thinking Machines offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.