Operations Coordinator

About Constellation

Constellation is an independent research center that brings together people throughout the AI safety ecosystem to accelerate insight, research, and talent through better cooperation. Unlike a conference or summit, Constellation operates continuously, in the form of a physical workspace as well as conference-style talks, workshops, and training bootcamps. Continuous operation allows for relationships and conversations to develop over time, meaningfully fostering trust, collaboration, and shared insight. It also makes Constellation a natural field-building hub by rapidly inspiring, orienting, and connecting people who are newer to the field.

Based in Berkeley, CA, our shared workspace hosts over 100 people per week across dozens of AI safety organizations in nonprofits, academia, industry, and government. Hundreds of other researchers spend time at Constellation for shorter visits each year. We believe this is the strongest and highest-output network of AI safety researchers in the world; dozens of participants in past Constellation programs have gone on to safety-focused roles at companies such as METR, Redwood Research, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and the US and UK Safety Institutes.

For more information, see our research focus areas and selected publications from Constellation fellows.

About the Role

The Operations Coordinator role is focused on providing office, administrative, and customer support to our staff and the researchers hosted in our shared workspace. This position will report to a member of the Program Operations team.

The ideal candidate is detail-oriented, has excellent interpersonal skills, and is excited to support AI safety research in a fast-paced and friendly work environment. (The vibe and pace of work is much closer to a growing startup than a traditional nonprofit.) Ideally, you also have a few years of office management, customer support, or administrative experience.

In this role, you’ll be the first person visitors and program participants meet when they arrive. You’ll respond to researcher support requests, maintain accurate records in our systems, troubleshoot and fix things around the office, and help facilitate special events.

This is an in-person, full-time position. This role requires being onsite from 8:30am-5:00pm on weekdays, plus periodic work on evenings and weekends when we are hosting events or handling urgent issues.

Key Responsibilities

• Administrative support: Reserving offices and meeting rooms. Booking travel and lodging for visitors and guests, preparing desks and offices for new members, updating headcount estimates, etc.
• Customer support: Welcoming visitors when they arrive, registering them in our systems, and giving orientation tours. Managing inbound support requests, solving the ones you can, and escalating tickets that require input from other team members.
• Site support: Troubleshoot and fix issues around the office. Order food, drinks, and office supplies. Update and post signage. 
• Event support: Staffing workshops and happy hours, helping with event setup and takedown, identifying and responding to issues.
• Team support: Supporting other programs and projects as needed. Over time, you can take on more responsibility and ownership of the work you find most interesting.

Skills & Experience

• Experience coordinating administrative tasks for a team
• Ability to be friendly, professional, and engaging with a wide range of people
• Clear, concise written communication
• Strong attention to detail
• High level of proficiency with Google Docs & Sheets
• Comfortable learning new web applications and technologies
• Experience managing customer support issues or user requests (preferred, not required)
• Experience maintaining a physical workspace (preferred, not required)
• Experience planning in-person events for groups (preferred, not required)
• Experience using Slack, Asana, and CRM tools (preferred, not required)

You might be a good fit for this role if you:

• Enjoy helping people face-to-face in a fast-paced environment
• Like creating spreadsheets to organize things
• Love creating to-do lists and crossing tasks off your list
• Can effectively prioritize and juggle a variety of competing requests
• Care a lot about improving the user/customer experience
• Are entrepreneurial and like learning new skills
• Like taking responsibility and owning your work
• Care about AI safety and improving researcher productivity

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation will depend on experience and will likely be $70,000-90,000/year.  

Our benefits are hard to beat! They include:

• Healthy lunches and dinners catered by our amazing kitchen team
• Unlimited snacks & drinks
• Generous vacation policy
• 401(k) with employer match
• Employer-paid commuter benefits
• High-quality health, dental, and vision insurance
• Friendly and supportive team
• Regular interaction with AI safety researchers and thought leaders

Additional Details 

This is a full time, on-site role. Our Berkeley office is a few steps from the nearest BART (metro) and bus stop. On-site parking is also available.

The preferred start date is between October 1 and December 1.

The ideal candidate for this role will have some combination of the skills and experiences described above. If you are not sure if you are qualified, we strongly encourage you to apply anyway.  Beyond the qualifications outlined, our priority is building a team that will help humanity safely navigate the development of transformative AI.  If you would be excited to do this work, we’d love to consider you.

We value diversity in all respects and base our hiring decisions on the needs of the organization and individual qualifications.  We welcome applicants from all backgrounds, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age or disability.