Job Description
Job Location: San Francisco - SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103
Position Type: Full Time
Salary Range: $176,000.00 - $209,000.00 Salary/yearHead of Operations
Youth AI Safety Institute
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- - - Organization
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- - - Common Sense Media
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- - - Program
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- - - Reports To
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- - - Executive Director (once hired) and Co-CEO until ED is in place
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- - - Location
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- - - San Francisco, CA (in office)
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- - - Classification
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- - - Full-time, Exempt
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- - - $176,000–$209,000
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POSITION OVERVIEW
The Head of Operations is the Executive Director's closest operational partner—the person who ensures that every dimension of Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute functions with integrity, efficiency, and strategic foresight. This is a senior leadership role that spans the full breadth of how the Institute operates: from fiduciary oversight and governance compliance to the smooth execution of our standards, evaluations, and public engagement work; from domestic and global partnership strategy to contract negotiations that anticipate the future shape of the AI industry.
This role ensures our governance is airtight, our partnerships are strategically sound, our work is free of legal or ethical vulnerabilities, and our organization moves with the coherence and coordination that a global safety lab demands. The Head of Operations is the connective tissue of the Institute: internally across the working team, cross-organizationally with Common Sense Media's shared functions, and externally with the academic, nonprofit, industry, and philanthropic partners who make our mission possible.
This is a role for a senior leader who has operated at the intersection of strategy and execution—someone who can hold both the long view and the immediate operational reality, who anticipates problems before they surface, and who builds the systems and relationships that allow the Executive Director to lead the Institute without being consumed by its mechanics.
The Head of Operations will oversee the Operations team, and will serve as the primary representative of the Institute with Common Sense Media's executive leadership, legal, finance, development, and product and engineering teams.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Institute Operations Leadership
- Serve as the operational anchor for the Institute's leadership team, ensuring that the research, standards, evaluations, and public engagement functions have what they need to move with speed, quality, and integrity.
- Identify and resolve operational risks—legal, ethical, logistical, or reputational—before they become problems, and develop clear escalation protocols for those that require Executive Director or Board attention.
- Build and continually improve the Institute's operating model: organizational processes, cross-functional workflows, decision-making frameworks, and accountability systems.
- Oversee the Operations team in setting direction, removing blockers, and ensuring coordination across the cross-org functions.
Fiduciary Oversight, Governance & Compliance
- Hold ultimate responsibility for the Institute's governance infrastructure, ensuring that charters, policies, conflict-of-interest procedures, independence safeguards, and decision-making firewalls are in place, enforced, and publicly defensible.
- Oversee funder compliance across philanthropic and industry relationships, ensuring that grant obligations, reporting requirements, and restricted-use conditions are met with rigor and documentation for the development team.
- Oversee the Institute's approach to formal complaints, methodological challenges, and legal inquiries, working with Common Sense Media's legal counsel to ensure that responses are principled, documented, and consistent.
Strategic Partnerships—Domestic & Global
- Cultivate the Institute's strategic partnerships at a senior level: identifying and supporting the relationships with academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, standards bodies, international agencies, and related partners, while ensuring that they're integrated with the appropriate research, standards, and evaluations and public engagement functions to further the Institute's credibility and global reach.
- Operate with a forward-looking lens: identify the organizations and relationships the Institute will need in two- to three-year windows—as standards expand, evaluations scale globally, and the AI landscape shifts—and begin building those relationships now.
- Represent the Institute in high-stakes partnership conversations and negotiations, including with frontier AI companies, global standards bodies, and international youth safety organizations.
- Support the Executive Director in cultivating relationships with key philanthropic and industry funders and coalition partners, ensuring that every engagement is strategically sequenced and well prepared.
Contract Negotiations & Legal Foresight
- Oversee all significant contract negotiations—with evaluation partners, academic collaborators, technology vendors, and international organizations—ensuring that terms are fair, independence is protected, and agreements anticipate future contingencies.
- Apply strategic foresight to contract design: As the AI industry evolves rapidly, ensure that agreements are structured to accommodate model updates, methodology changes, product category expansion, and shifts in the regulatory environment.
- Set the Institute's contracting standards, approval frameworks, and spending authority policies, and ensure they are consistently applied across all operational relationships.
- Identify legal and contractual risks proactively—including IP ownership, liability exposure, data use, and publication rights—and work with legal counsel to address them before they become constraints.
Cross-Organizational Connector
- Serve as the primary operational liaison between the Institute and Common Sense Media's shared services—finance, legal, HR, communications, development, product and engineering, and marketing—ensuring that the Institute has timely access to support and that cross-organizational commitments are tracked and honored.
- Ensure that the Institute's work is visible and well understood across Common Sense Media, fostering the internal collaboration and organizational awareness that multiplies impact.
- Represent the Institute's operational interests in Common Sense Media leadership forums and planning processes.
- Build the internal culture and communication rhythms—team meetings, cross-functional syncs, project tracking, reporting cadences—that keep a lean, high-stakes team coordinated and aligned.
QUALIFICATIONS
Required
- 10–15 years of professional experience in senior operations, strategy, legal affairs, or institutional leadership, with at least five years at a level 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.
Preferred
- Experience in AI policy, technology safety, digital rights, or adjacent fields, with sufficient technical fluency to engage credibly with frontier AI companies and standards experts.
- Background in international organizations, global multi-stakeholder initiatives, or cross-jurisdictional policy work.
- Experience supporting a founding executive director or CEO of a startup, institute, or new program at scale.
- Familiarity with standards-setting bodies, benchmarking organizations, or independent research institutes.
WHAT WE OFFER
- A senior leadership role at the operational heart of one of the most consequential youth safety initiatives of the AI era, with real authority and direct partnership with the Executive Director.
- The opportunity to shape how a new institution operates—its culture, its systems, and its relationships—at a moment when those choices matter enormously.
- A mission-driven team with a 23-year track record of impact for families and children.
- Competitive nonprofit compensation and comprehensive benefits.
- A collaborative, flexible work environment with meaningful access to the Institute's leadership and the broader Common Sense Media organization.
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ABOUT COMMON SENSE MEDIA
Common Sense Media is the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing the research-backed information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in the age of apps, algorithms, and AI. We rate, educate, and advocate for policies to protect and prepare kids online. Our ratings, research, and resources reach more than 150 million users globally, over 1.4 million educators, and more than 100,000 schools worldwide every year. Learn more at commonsense.org.
As part of Common Sense Media, the Youth AI Safety Institute sets standards, conducts research, and independently tests the AI products children use most.
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. However, job offers are made on the condition that the applicant subsequently passes a criminal background check. If the background check indicates a prior criminal conviction, we will conduct an individualized assessment to determine whether the conviction should result in denial of employment. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
