AIS Hiring Snapshot

The entry-level cliff in AI safety hiring

Read straight from each org's own hiring system, today's openings lean heavily toward senior people. Ways in for someone early in their career are rare.

Snapshot 2026-08-10. 75 current vacancies across 12 mission-driven AI-safety organizations, after setting aside 12 standing "expression of interest" listings. Frontier labs are reported separately, not mixed in.

5%
of vacancies are open to early-career applicants
47%
carry a senior title
12
AI-safety orgs in the dataset
How to read this. A role counts as open to early-career applicants if its title carries an entry marker (intern, internship, junior, new grad, graduate, apprentice, scholar, or a fellowship program), or its description asks for two years of experience or less and the title carries no senior marker. Note that a plain "Fellow" is not treated as entry: at a think tank that is an experienced staff title, not a way in. It counts vacancies that are posted in public. A lot of senior and network hiring never gets advertised, so if anything this view understates how hard the early years are.

Senior-marked titles outnumber entry-marked ones by a wide margin. The senior bucket is carried by middle-of-the-org titles rather than C-suite ones, most often Lead, Manager, Head of, which is worth remembering before reading it as a field full of executive openings. Most of the rest give no clear seniority signal in the title at all.

The pattern is uneven across orgs, so be careful reading the totals: one organization, Goodfire, makes up about 37% of all the vacancies here, and senior roles sit at 47% with it included versus 45% without it. The steadier finding is on the entry side: only 4 of the 12 orgs post any early-career role at all.

How people actually get in

Here are the early-career openings in this snapshot:

3 of the 4 are structured programs (internships, fellowships, scholar positions) rather than standing staff jobs, so even the narrow way in is mostly a program.

Frontier labs are no easier

Anthropic's public board, kept separate because most of its roles are not safety work, runs at 3% early-career against 5% here, across a far larger board (388 vacancies). Both are low, so the cliff is not an artifact of small orgs with few openings, though note the lab share is the lower of the two.

On stated experience: where a posting names a minimum, the floor sits around 5 years. Only a few orgs name a number at all, and most of those come from a single org (Goodfire) that uses a structured template, so read it as a side note, not a field-wide figure.

What this is, and what it is not

Every role here comes from the organization's own hiring system rather than a curated job board, which avoids the picking-and-choosing built into those boards. It only covers orgs we could reach. The coverage page lists every org and how its data was collected, and the trends page tracks these numbers as new snapshots come in.