ARENA UK Programme Lead
Organise and lead ARENA’s technical AI safety bootcamps in London
The role:
We’re hiring for a UK Programme Lead to lead the ARENA programme as we scale our operations in the UK. You’ll take responsibility for owning ARENA’s presence and identity as a flagship technical AI safety upskilling programme, ensuring that all those who engage with ARENA’s offering – whether as in-person programme participants, hiring organisations, external AI safety groups using our materials, or other parties – have their needs catered for seamlessly and effectively.
In this role, you’ll combine your technical skills and deep familiarity with technical AI safety research with operational nous, strong soft skills, organisation and strategy. You’ll have full autonomy to shape ARENA’s offering and overall identity to best fulfil our mission.
About ARENA:
ARENA is a technical AI safety upskilling bootcamp, originally based at the London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA). Our 5-week residential programmes provide talented individuals with the ML engineering skills, community, and confidence to contribute to technical AI safety work. Since 2023, we’ve trained hundreds of alumni now working across the AI safety ecosystem. Our curriculum is hosted at learn.arena.education.
ARENA’s bootcamps are designed to bridge the gap between broad-use mathematical/programming talent and full-time work in AI safety. Our alumni have gone on to work at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, the UK AI Security Institute, Apollo Research, and across the wider AI safety research community.
Why this role matters:
ARENA is one of the most impactful programmes in the AI safety ecosystem, and we have ambitious plans to scale up over the coming years. As we bring more talented individuals through ARENA – whether through our in-person programme, our online materials, or engaging with us in another way – it’s critical that their experience matches our mission of leaving them fully equipped to contribute to technical AI safety. Consequently, the ARENA UK Programme Lead occupies a position of high responsibility in the AI safety landscape. This role exists to ensure that ARENA remains well-equipped to carry out its mission as AI capabilities continue to advance. You’ll work closely with the Head of Operations, ARENA’s technical staff, and the LISA team as you carry out this work.
Details:
Based at the London Initiative for Safe AI in London, UK.
Employment type: Full-time, in-person (with scope for hybrid working outside of in-person programme dates).
The advertised salary for this role is £100,000-£120,000 plus benefits. However, we'd be willing to pay more for exceptional candidates.
Start date: as soon as possible, ideally by January 2027.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
What you’ll do:
The ARENA UK Programme Lead will be the main representative of ARENA. You will ensure that in-person ARENA programmes run smoothly in London, from initial participant selection through to the final week of each iteration. As such, the successful candidate will combine technical literacy and AI safety context with a willingness to drive operations forward and ensure key milestones are met throughout the year.
In practice, this will involve:
Running each cohort end to end: selecting participants for the programme (application, coding assessment, interviews) and ensuring the in-person programme functions seamlessly. Additionally, the UK Programme Lead will have the freedom to determine the details of what participant experience on the ARENA UK Programme looks like, ranging from guest speakers to extracurricular activities and careers events.
Setting the curriculum's direction: keeping the curriculum up-to-date with progress with state-of-the-art research across interpretability, alignment science, RL and evaluations. This will require working with TAs and curriculum contributors, as well as having sufficient independent research taste to assess the current landscape and make informed decisions about potential directions for curriculum development.
Building the team: recruiting and lead teaching assistants, operations staff and any other hires as ARENA UK grows.
Owning external relationships: navigating key communications with funders, host organisations, and partner programmes who also use the ARENA materials.
Working with operations: planning budgets, ensuring smooth logistics and providing participants with essential support. The successful candidate will also assist with designing and building scalable processes as ARENA grows.
About you:
We're looking for three things: technical fluency in AI safety, real ownership inside an organisation, and experience of fast growth. However, we imagine that many strong applicants may only have experience with two – or even just one – of these areas.
Please apply even if you feel you don't meet every requirement; we’d rather see your application than you self-select out!
1. Technical fluency in AI safety
This doesn't need to be comprehensive, but you should have demonstrated engagement with at least one of:
Interpretability;
Alignment science;
Reinforcement learning, as applied to modern LLMs;
LLM evaluations, for alignment-relevant properties;
Necessary: evidence of substantial engagement with technical AI safety, such as papers, technical blog posts or a GitHub portfolio.
Ideal:
You've taken part in ARENA or another programme using ARENA’s materials, or otherwise know the ARENA material well.
You have well-developed opinions on AI safety field-building strategy, as well as technical experience.
You've done field-building directly.
2. Ownership and leadership
Necessary: you've owned significant projects within an organisation. You go beyond your direct remit to make sure everything in a project gets done, and when it doesn't, you finish it yourself.
Ideal:
You've run an organisation yourself.
You're used to juggling competing demands and prioritising so that mission-critical work lands on time.
3. Building through fast growth
ARENA plans to grow significantly in the near future, so experience with hiring and creating sustainable processes in a fast-growing organisation will be highly valuable.
Ideal:
You've worked at a startup or similar organisation going through fast growth.