Special Projects Manager

Type: Full-time or Part-time.

Location: Remote (4+ hours overlap with CET working hours preferred).

Application deadline: 3 November 2026, end of day (Anywhere on Earth).

Compensation: $90K - $160K. Adjusted depending on location, seniority, and experience. It can be higher for exceptional candidates or specific locations with higher costs of living (e.g. San Francisco).

Start: As soon as possible.

Take full ownership of one of Apart's new initiatives. Turn a loosely scoped idea into a plan, run it end to end with partners, funders and contractors, and take it from a first pilot to a program that works.

About Apart

Apart Research is an AI safety nonprofit. Our field building programs (research sprints and fellowships) bring new talent into AI safety and help it produce research that matters. Alongside them we incubate Special Projects: new initiatives that each solve a specific problem in the AI safety ecosystem. We're hiring a Special Projects Manager to own them.

The Role

You'll own one or two Special Projects at a time, and you'll own them fully: the plan and its dates, every conversation with partners and funders, the contractors working on it, its funding applications, and its results.

You'll report to the CEO at first, and to our Director of Research Programs once that role is filled.

Core Responsibilities

• Turn a loosely scoped project into a delivery plan with owners, dates and a definition of done, and keep it current.
• Review the project's design and improve it with advisors and partner organizations.
• Manage all communication with partner and host organizations, contractors, advisors and funders.
• Run the project's pipeline end to end.
• Write the funding applications and two-pagers for your project, and report progress to its funders.
• Onboard and coordinate the contractors and experts who work on your project.
• Build the systems your project runs on: one CRM as the single source of truth, templates, and follow-up automations.
• Report status every week with links and numbers, and say early when a date will slip.
• Track whether your project works and use it to make the next round better.
• Take a new idea to a running pilot in weeks.

Required Qualifications

• High agency: You start things without being asked, and you finish them, including the unglamorous parts.
• Proven ownership: You have personally run a project with several outside parties from start to finish, with little direction.
• Follow-through: Partners, funders and contractors don't wait on you, and you keep your own deadlines.
• AI-native: You build and use AI tools and automations in your own work, and you check what they produce before it ships.
• High context: You follow AI safety closely, know which organizations do what, and understand what it takes to bring strong people into the field.
• You learn from others: When you have not done something before, you study how comparable programs did it and ask the people who ran them.

Nice to Have

• You have started something yourself: a startup, an organization or a program.
• Experience running a program, fellowship, competition or placement scheme.
• A sense for talent: how to spot strong people and bring them into a program.
• Experience writing grant applications or partner proposals.
• Enough technical background to judge an AI engineer's work.
• Experience managing contractors.

What We Offer

• Ownership of Special Projects at Apart Research.
• Travel support for conferences and team gatherings.
• A $5,000 annual learning and development budget and protected time for reading, thinking and upgrading your AI workflows.
• A small, fast-moving team that ships and disagrees openly.

Application Process

1. Application form
2. Screening call
3. Take-home assignment (paid)
4. Reference checks
5. Interviews
6. Work trial (paid)
7. Offer

Apart Research is an equal opportunity organization and welcomes applicants of all backgrounds. We may use AI-assisted tools to support review; all applications are read by a human and final decisions are made by people. We process the information you submit to assess your application and may match it against our candidate-sourcing records (public professional information and talent-directory entries) to give reviewers fuller context; we keep application data only as long as needed for recruiting, including considering you for future roles, and delete it on request. Questions about the role or how your data is processed: careers@apartresearch.com.