Work with us
We’re building the founding team
Trajectory Institute on AI is newly formed and small by design. We use AI tooling to do the work of a much larger research shop. The first people here own a lot of ground, and their work reaches decision-makers quickly.
Below are the kinds of people we’re looking for as we grow. If one of them is you, we’d like to hear from you, even where we haven’t posted a formal, funded opening yet. Tell us what you’d want to build.
Research dissemination & policy engagement Get our research to the people who can use it
Excellent analysis is worth little if it never reaches a desk on deadline. This role carries the Institute’s published research to the people who make decisions, and listens for what they actually need.
What you’d do
- Bring our published analysis, survey results, and tools to congressional and agency staff through nonpartisan educational briefings, offered to offices across the political spectrum on the same terms.
- Build relationships with researchers, journalists, and policy organizations to widen the reach of our educational materials.
- Do listening-mode outreach: find out what analytical gaps decision-makers face, and bring that back to shape what we study.
- Turn dense research into briefings and explainers a busy staffer can use in an afternoon.
Who you are
- Self-directed and unbothered by a cold inbox and an empty calendar. You make the first move, and you follow up.
- Credibly nonpartisan: you can brief a Republican office and a Democratic office the same week and mean it both times.
- Energized by an early-stage organization where you’ll own real surface area, not a slice of someone else’s.
Research & analysis Produce the analysis the field is missing
There is a lot of AI research and very little of it lands in a form a decision-maker can use. This role produces nonpartisan, decision-relevant analysis: rigorous, well-sourced, and written for an educated non-specialist.
What you’d do
- Conduct nonpartisan analysis of how different categories of governance approaches have performed in analogous regulatory domains. This is comparative, institutional work, not specific legislative recommendations.
- Build and maintain our open analytical tools and the evidence base behind them.
- Design and field public-opinion research (including the in-person fieldwork most AI research skips), and publish full methodology every time.
- Write up what the evidence does and does not support, caveats included, for a general audience.
Who you are
- Rigorous and fast: you can take a messy question and ship a defensible, well-sourced answer.
- Comfortable publishing what you’re unsure about, and saying so plainly.
- Entrepreneurial: you want to help define a research agenda, not just execute one.
Looking for advocacy or organizing work?
Direct advocacy, organizing, and lobbying are not part of the Institute’s charitable work. They belong to our independent sister organization, Trajectory Action on AI (a 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization). If that’s the work that excites you, tell us; those roles will be posted there.
How to reach us
There’s no portal and no form. Email us with a short note on what you’d want to work on and anything you’ve built that shows how you think. We read everything.
Write to careers@trajectoryinstitute.org.