Senior Strategist, AI Governance Field Coordination

Future Matters is hiring a strategist and builder for one of the most consequential efforts of the next years: bringing the US AI governance field together and coordinating it to develop joint strategies and foresight, safeguarding humanity during a rapid and dangerous time of AI transition.

Key information

• Title: Senior Strategist, AI Governance Field Coordination

• Location: Washington D.C. area or Bay Area preferred; remote possible, United States. Remote-first work, with substantial in-person presence in DC required.

• Seniority: experienced mid-career; Senior Individual Contributor

• Compensation: $132,675 to $163,190

• Benefits: private health insurance (100% of the employee premium and 50% for dependents, incl. dental and vision), 401(k) with 6% employer contribution, company-paid life and disability insurance, professional development budget, up to 10% paid time for professional development, home office stipend, co-working space budget, work equipment budget and company laptop, mental health support and accountability coaching

• Annual leave: 27 days paid vacation plus 11 public holidays

• Travel: as needed to connect with stakeholders, plus approximately three weeks per year for team meetings and retreats

• Contract: Permanent, full-time contract

• Start date: Autumn 2026

• Application deadline: Priority application by August 16, 2026

About Future Matters and our AI governance work

Future Matters exists to make sure the best ideas for reducing catastrophic and existential risks are turned into action.

Good ideas that could make a difference on serious issues like AI governance, biosecurity and climate protection are relatively common. The best ones, however, are often overlooked, and even the right idea goes nowhere without enough support behind it.

We work out which promising ideas are both realistic and not yet getting the attention they deserve, then map the landscape and create the strategy and coordination forums they need to be acted on.

Our work is guided by core principles for better strategy:

• Work upstream, not downstream. Shape the early, high-level questions and paradigms that constrain everything later.

• Backward chain from the win. Start at the outcome, then find the conditions that force it.

• Targetedness over scale. The right lever at the right moment beats sheer volume of effort.

• Distribution, not product. There are many good ideas whose bottleneck isn’t more detail but investing in strategic distribution that builds the support that turns them into reality.

• Ultimate outcomes, not proxies. Push past shiny proxies to figure out and focus on what actually drives impact.

Over the past 18 months, Future Matters has started working on better coordination for the AI governance field and now runs several coordination forums. These include a standing group that brings together senior leaders from more than 30 U.S. AI advocacy organizations, with regular strategy meetings; an AI and biosecurity coalition that has grown from six organizations to ten; and a global coalition, now led by Future Matters, that aligns AI safety efforts across countries.

This coordination work was recently evaluated and funded by Founders Pledge, a philanthropic research and grantmaking organization. In their words: "When a major AI model is released, over a hundred safety organizations respond independently, resulting in duplicated effort and missed windows. This grant funds the standing coordination infrastructure that lets the field share intelligence, align strategy, and respond as one."

Our team culture

Future Matters seeks to create an environment where talented people can do their best work. Employees describe our workplace feel as "warm and sciency." A few of our practices and values:

• We are relentlessly driven by impact. We look for what actually changes outcomes; even if it is unglamorous, we are willing to stop good work to do higher-impact work.

• We believe the best argument, evidence, or reasoning should determine our actions even if it doesn't come from the highest-ranking person in the room. We celebrate changing our minds given new information.

• We accept, own, and learn from mistakes. We have a Slack channel where everyone, including directors, shares their recent mistakes and lessons learned.

• We get things done fast. Instead of aiming for perfection, we ask, "Is this safe enough to try?" and lean into action.

• We care for and support each other, appreciate everyone's contributions, and help each other succeed.

• We gather twice a year for team retreats, where we work intensively on our most important projects and get to know each other.

About this role

For years, Future Matters has helped organizations working on the world's most serious risks figure out what actually makes a difference. Our strategic coordination work grew out of that, and it has become some of the most valuable work we do. We are now expanding this strategic coordination and coalition-building, grounded in rigorous strategy craft, into a dedicated program, and this is the first hire of this new chapter.

Concretely, this role involves finding the people and organizations who can move the key questions in AI governance forward, build and own the relationships that bring them to the table, and help a fragmented field act with shared strategy and foresight, so it builds support for key ideas systematically and makes the most of windows of opportunity that open and close fast. Done well, a fragmented field starts acting together, and the odds of a safer future rise.

Responsibilities of the role

• Gain a working command of Future Matters' impact maximization and strategy methodology.

• Grow and deepen the existing U.S. coordination infrastructure by deepening relationships, facilitating more candid exchange, and stand up new, responsive forums based on the developing needs.

• Build and lead new US AI governance coordination initiatives. Identify and bring together the right players, establish coalition priorities different stakeholders support, lead the group to alignment on shared priorities and into taking action on these priorities.

• Keep the work and the stakeholders moving forward by being the engine behind winning conditions: you will be responsible for bottleneck diagnosis, backward-chaining, and sequencing the work to ensure barriers and sticking points are identified and ameliorated as quickly as possible.

• Build joint foresight, increasing our collective rapid-response capability by prototyping and running a shared horizon-scanning practice so foreseeable developments get surfaced early, allowing for better chances to anticipate windows of opportunity and capitalize upon them. Build coalition members’ capacity so groups can act quickly and effectively when a sudden window opens.

• Understanding coordination challenges and finding opportunities. Develop a credible, peer-supported answer as to where the AI governance field could be better coordinated and how to achieve this, including a list of what our team could offer specifically that would add the most value.

• Adapt as things change: treat plans as provisional, with a bias to action and a "safe enough to try" instinct. Be excited to revise your strategy and sequencing as political and technical developments disrupt assumptions and change the landscape.

• Contribute to strategy craft and capacity-building outputs. Feed insights back into Future Matters' guides and workshops, helping partners across the field work more strategically.

• Support fundraising for this work. Contribute case studies of recent wins, surface intelligence on funding opportunities, and add expert knowledge to grant applications, working with our Partnerships team.

You will work most closely with Managing Director, Justus Baumann, who is leading Future Matters' AI work. We also expect to expand the AI team in the first months after your start. You will also occasionally support colleagues from our Partnerships team and other members of the team.

What we're looking for

This is a builder's role for someone who has scaled something, from a nascent stage or from scratch, in a political field: a coalition, an advocacy campaign, or something adjacent. A successful applicant will have most or all of these:

• Strategic reasoning and systems thinking. You reason through different options for achieving goals, think through trade-offs across scenarios, identify bottlenecks and multi-step plans to resolve them, sequence sensibly and defend the reasoning, and anticipate actions and motivations of other players. You clearly think through actions as embedded in systems and longer-term strategies.

• Entrepreneurial strength, drive, and high agency. You have started things with little scaffolding, ship MVPs over perfecting, and are comfortable with strategic risks and failures and what to do after failing. You bring relentless follow-through and don't wait to be told what to do but are happy to collaborate and support when asked. This is a role with intense periods and plans that change, and you’re comfortable navigating that.

• A proven track record as an outcome-focused convener. Not just bringing people together, but stewarding different players to actually achieve goals together. You are described by others as a trusted, honest broker; orgs come back to work with you again, and you can diagnose why a past coordination effort failed and what you changed going forward.

• Working knowledge of US politics and the D.C. political machinery. You have experience and deep understanding of how policymaking and campaigns actually work in and around Washington. You can explain how a specific outcome was actually won, you know the real levers and where they break, and senior policy people view you as a peer.

• Social and political intelligence. You read power, incentives, and rooms: accurately reading stakeholder motivations; anticipating who will push back and why; adapting your approach by audience; and defusing inter-coalition tensions well.

• Learning aptitude. You have a track record of getting up to speed in a new domain quickly, you ask sharp questions, and you synthesize unfamiliar material accurately. You are genuinely curious about the field and already staying current on key AI developments.

• Truth-seeking, impact focus, and a collaborative, low-ego style. You update your view when shown evidence; distinguish what you know from what you believe; are comfortable saying "I don't know" but also making a reasonable call given incomplete information; and prioritize impact rather than activity.

Bonus qualities

You do not need these in order to apply, but we are especially interested in candidates who also bring some of the following:

• Being connected in and known across the US AI governance ecosystem, with warm relationships that let you open doors

• AI-governance domain knowledge: already conversant in key areas and interventions and up to date on current status

• Direct experience on major frontier-AI legislation (e.g. SB 53, RAISE Act) or on carrying a contested horizontal tech bill through real legislative process

• Experience designing or applying a structured methodology (strategy consulting, evaluation, or structured prioritisation in any sector)

• Capacity-building or training-delivery experience (workshop design, structured advisory engagements)

Application Process Overview

Here is the process we expect to follow to hire for this role, with the possibility of slight modification as needed:

1. Application, including Resume and Short Answer Questions

2. Initial Conversational Interview

3. Paid Work Task (with both independent and collaborative aspects)

4. Interview with Managing Director

5. Reference Checks

6. Offer Extended

We are targeting an Autumn, 2026 start date for this role.

We value diversity at our organisation. We do not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, age, physical appearance, marital status, or disability. Therefore, we are happy to make any reasonable accommodations necessary to welcome all to our workplace. Please contact us to discuss adjustments to the application process if needed: contact@future-matters.org

Application

Instead of a cover letter, please answer the short-answer questions below. Please keep answers to 150 to 200 words and don't spend too long editing or formatting.