Head of Operations, Youth AI Safety Institute

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.