---
title: 'Business Operations Manager at Transluce'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-manager-transluce-san-francisco-0wqvya5tm7cv'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Business Operations Manager at Transluce

- **Company:** Transluce
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/transluce/am9icG9zdDp5dZgeXztj3LSo6bEBsrDb

## Job description

Salary range: $170,000 - $250,000/year depending on experience + comprehensive benefits.

Description: Today's AI systems are difficult to understand — even experts struggle to predict behaviors like blackmail or sycophancy. And most analyses of AI systems are done behind closed doors, by the same labs deploying them. Society cannot rely on AI developers to grade their own homework.

Transluce is a non-profit research lab building world-class tools to oversee AI and steer its development for the public good. We use AI to investigate AI, at a scale manual testing cannot reach, and we build in public so anyone can use what we make.

About the role: Transluce is growing from 20 to 40+ employees in the next 12 months. We are looking for a Business Operations Manager to build the infrastructure that will let 40 people do their best work: how money moves, how we stay secure, how we choose our tools, and how the office works. This is not a role about keeping a machine running, but about building our operating system. This function is load-bearing. When operations are weak, people lose time to things that should just work.

We have a solid operational foundation (e.g., Google Workspace, SOC 2, external accountants), but a lot of what works for 20 people will not work for 40+. Your role is to decide what gets built and in what order, so we get ahead of problems rather than repairing them. Strategy and execution are not separable here: the systems you design are the ones you run, and the judgment calls you make are informed by your hands-on experience. Because we are a small team, you may also flex into other operational domains, further expanding your skillset.

This is an individual-contributor role reporting to the Chief of Staff. You will steward and mature our Business Operations function, directly advising the leadership team on key directional decision-making. We expect to continue expanding the operations team, and you would help define these roles.

You are ...

- Energized by building a whole domain and ready to be the core person accountable for its excellence
- Opinionated about finances, tooling, security, and office — and eager to apply and test those best practices in our specific context
- As invested in running a process well as in designing it
- Observant and relentless. You are unable to leave a broken process alone. You notice the friction and fix it
- Able to catch an accounting error while still thinking about what we need to build next quarter
- Trusted with money, access, and information that should not travel

Core responsibilities: You will build our business operations infrastructure and drive its day-to-day execution including deciding where to automate, streamline, or outsource.

- Financial operations: You are accountable for how money moves through Transluce: accurate, controlled and auditable, so spending is understood and predictable.- Direct our external accountants: give them the organizational context they need, review what they produce, and catch what they miss
- Run the controls our fiscal policy requires (receipts on transactions, card statement reviews, spend approvals) and tighten them where they are weak
- Own accounts payable and receivable, and process donations with clear donor communication, tracking and documentation
- Ensure our annual financial audit is uneventful: clean books and evidence ready
- Internal tools and security: You give the team tools that make the work easier, and keep our security commitments while doing it- Administer our internal tool stack including Google Workspace and Slack; recommend new tools and retire what we've outgrown
- Develop cybersecurity and privacy policies and ensure compliance alongside external firm and leadership
- Maintain SOC 2 compliance by monitoring our compliance software, ensuring we maintain required controls, and coordinating with our auditors
- Office management: You own the office as infrastructure: the physical environment that lets people do their best work. Our Executive Assistant runs day-to-day upkeep and events. You decide how the physical space should change as we grow- Fix what the space gets wrong and anticipate what 40+ people will need: sound insulation, call booths, etc.
- Own our office IT (high-speed internet, room booking, A/V) so that nobody loses ten minutes of a meeting to a broken call
- Maintain strong relationships with building management to address office issues promptly and effectively

## Minimum qualifications

- Reliable, self-directed, highly conscientious, and proactive operator who can manage the details of multiple workstreams and prioritize well
- Working knowledge of finance and accounting or ability to learn it fast
- Has managed external vendors to a defined standard, including pushing back on or replacing them when they underdeliver
- Technically fluent: can hold a substantive conversation with a security consultant or an IT vendor, and tell good work from bad
- Proficient with spreadsheets, accounting software, and financial management tools
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills

## Preferred qualifications

- At least 4 years of professional experience in finance, consulting, business operations, IT, or similar. Ideally at growing startups or non-profits. Candidates with less overall experience or nontraditional backgrounds are encouraged to apply and may be considered for similar roles
- Has scaled operations at a similarly sized organization
- Can help with financial planning such as budgeting and cash flow projections. This is a bonus rather than a requirement.
- Already leverages AI and other productivity tools to work effectively or eager to learn. Deep technical skills not required.
- Well-connected in the AI research space

This role might not be for you if …

- you are happiest running a process someone else designed, and would rather not be the one deciding what to change
- you take pride in honoring every request and polishing every detail even when it’s not the highest-leverage
- you want to set direction and hand the details to someone else,
- you would find chasing building management or fixing the A/V beneath you,

We work from our San Francisco office four days a week: our in-person culture is a big part of what makes Transluce special. We are open to sponsoring international visas for exceptional candidates.

## About Transluce

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Transluce is a nonprofit research lab building the open-source technology stack for scalable, public oversight of AI systems.
- **Entity Type**: Nonprofit (Private, Independent Research Lab)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jacob Steinhardt (Co-founder & CEO), Sarah Schwettmann (Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI Safety Research / Interpretability
- **Target customers**: Frontier AI labs, governments, and the broader public; their tools are designed for use by independent evaluators, policymakers, and researchers.
- **Mission**: To build the infrastructure for understanding AI, steering its development in the public interest, and enabling a public science of model behavior.

## Products & Services
- **Activation Oracles**: A scalable, AI-driven interpretability tool for understanding model behavior, shown to improve with model size, data quality, and data volume. Research paper published on scaling to trillion-parameter models. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
- **Mental Health Evaluation**: The most expansive independent evaluation to date of how leading AI models respond to users in mental health crises, published in August 2026. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
- **Oversight Assistant Platform**: An end-to-end system for AI oversight, designed to help researchers and evaluators analyze model behavior at scale. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (nonprofit organization).
- **Key Metric**: Team size of 22 employees, with **109.1% yearly headcount growth** (LinkedIn). Funded by philanthropic donors; specific funding amounts are not publicly disclosed.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: 
  - **Mike McCormick**: First Funder and Board Member [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
  - **Common Sense Media**: Independent technical research partner for the Youth AI Safety Institute (announced May 2026) [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Expanding from 20 employees to 40+ in the next year (July 2026 hiring announcement) [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
  - Published two major research papers in August 2026 (on Scaling Activation Oracles and Scaling Laws for Exact String Elicitation) [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
  - Recruiting for high-level roles including VP of Engineering, signaling rapid scaling [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/transluce)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Independence & Public Interest Mandate**: Operates as a truly independent, nonprofit lab with no commercial conflicts — they have a published Independence and Transparency Policy and a Responsible Disclosure Policy [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/about).
- **Open Source & Scalable Tech**: All tools are built open-source to allow public vetting and improve reliability, a key differentiator from proprietary black-box audits.
- **Talent Magnet**: Attracts alumni from top AI labs and organizations including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Carnegie Mellon University. Their alumni go on to roles at Google DeepMind, Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, and other key institutions [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling Interpretability**: Training larger models and developing tools that work on trillion-parameter systems [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/).
- **Public Science of AI**: Building an open scientific ecosystem where evaluations and methods are publicly vetted and reproducible.
- **Government & Industry Partnerships**: Engaging with frontier AI labs and governments to ensure internal assessments match publicly vetted standards.
- **Youth AI Safety**: Research partnership with Common Sense Media for the Youth AI Safety Institute, focusing on how AI models behave in mental health contexts [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-Driven Work**: Directly contribute to AI safety and public understanding of a technology with extraordinary societal consequences.
- **Growth Trajectory**: Explosive headcount growth (109% YoY) with aggressive hiring plans (doubling team to 40+ in the next year) means significant impact and career acceleration for early employees [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).
- **Workspace**: In-office at HQ in San Francisco, California (1301 Sansome St). Employees work from a physical office with a strong emphasis on in-person collaboration [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/transluce).
- **Culture**: Described as a place where you "run the systems that let the technical team focus on AI safety research" and create "clarity out of ambiguity" — suited for motivated generalists and technical experts alike [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).
- **Open Roles** (as of Aug/Sep 2026): VP of Engineering, AI Behavior Engineer, Operations Generalist, Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Full-Stack Product Engineer, AI Systems Engineer, Research Engineer - Scalable Interpretability [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/transluce).

## Sources
1. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
2. [transluce.org/about](https://transluce.org/about)
3. [linkedin.com/company/transluce](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
4. [builtin.com/company/transluce](https://builtin.com/company/transluce)
5. [jobs.gem.com/transluce](https://jobs.gem.com/transluce)

## Other roles at Transluce

- [People Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-manager-transluce-san-francisco-rerrmd8ypmpq) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Behavior Researcher - Agent Alignment](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-behavior-researcher-agent-alignment-transluce-san-francisco-71m857j6ac40) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer - Oversight Foundations](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-oversight-foundations-transluce-san-francisco-tggwq73gfg0s) — San Francisco, CA
- [VP of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-engineering-transluce-san-francisco-m3yzxzmhekj5) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Behavior Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-behavior-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-mr9gkhnfhpyr) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Behavior Researcher - Human Impacts](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-behavior-researcher-human-impacts-transluce-san-francisco-07997m7d0kkp) — San Francisco, CA
- [Governance & Policy Fellow](https://feeny.ai/job/governance-policy-fellow-transluce-san-francisco-dejeq9hbc6sc) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-systems-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-21qzm98xjn4t) — San Francisco, CA
- [Full-Stack Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-product-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-akrtqqxqthmn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Scientist/Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-research-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-afzb68nfx83b) — San Francisco, CA