---
title: 'Governance & Policy Fellow at Transluce'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/governance-policy-fellow-transluce-san-francisco-dejeq9hbc6sc'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Governance & Policy Fellow at Transluce

- **Company:** Transluce
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-01-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/transluce/am9icG9zdDpVz8DJmgMdoy_WaOqlBt2o

## Job description

Type: Full-time, with part time opportunities available for exceptional candidates Salary range: $200,000 - $300,000/year + benefits

Description: Transluce is an independent nonprofit AI research lab. Our mission is to advance an industry standard for AI oversight and to develop the technology that enables it. We believe that thoroughly understanding AI systems, at scale, is essential to ensuring they serve the public interest.

About the role: We're looking for a Governance & Policy Fellow to support and extend Transluce’s growing work at the intersection of AI evaluation, policy, and governance. This is a unique opportunity to work directly with researchers at the cutting edge of AI, interact with top labs and government stakeholders, and help shape the direction of a growing team.

This role is ideal for someone with a hybrid technical and policy background interested in working on problems that require both—helping to define how independent AI evaluation should work in practice. Our governance team is new, the mandate is broad, and the right person will be deeply involved in defining priorities and strategy.

Core Responsibilities: You'll work closely with our Head of Governance to:

- Define standards and best practices for independent AI oversight. For example, Transluce organizes thehttps://aievaluatorforum.org[AI Evaluator Forum](https://aievaluatorforum.org), which brings together leading independent AI research labs to advance a vibrant and sustainable ecosystem of credible third-party AI evaluation. In your role, you’d help define standards and best practices (such as our [AEF-1](https://aef.one) standard for evaluator independence), organize and expand the Forum’s membership, and identify ways to increase the reach and impact of independent evaluation.
- Develop partnerships enabling impactful, interdisciplinary AI evaluations. We believe meaningful AI evaluations require deep expertise from diverse fields. This means proactively identifying areas that would benefit from outside expertise and building and maintaining relationships with leaders across relevant fields. For example, Transluce is partnering with leading AI developers, mental health experts, and affected users to develop and deploy independent evaluations of AI impacts on self-harm, suicide risk, mania, psychosis, and more.
- Engage with Government and Policy Stakeholders. This includes educating policymakers on the science of AI oversight, the importance of independent evaluators, and our substantive findings on topics like model behavior, mental health, and child safety. This also includes supporting and expanding Transluce’s established contracts, grants, and support relationships with government AI evaluators and regulators, including the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation, the EU AI Office, and the UK AI Security Institute.
- Make Technical Research Accessible. You will help translate our technical research for a range of audiences—including policymakers, journalists, and the general public—ensuring our work reaches the people who need it. This includes the challenge of making deep research topics broadly accessible to a general audience in areas like reinforcement learning and AI interpretability.

Qualities of a strong candidate: We're looking for someone with a genuinely hybrid background—technically fluent but also grounded in policy, law, or governance. This is a dynamic role, and we expect a successful candidate to have a strong foundation but be ready and excited to stretch into new domains.

We’re excited about candidates who bring a combination of:

- Technical fluency in AI evaluation issues. You’re excited to engage in deep conversations with technical researchers. You understand how AI systems are tested, what makes evaluations rigorous, and you can translate technical work for broader audiences.
- Hands-on policy or legal experience related to AI. You can craft policy approaches that have meaningful impact because you’ve seen how policy is made and how institutions work—ideally from inside government (at any level) or from practicing law in a relevant context.
- Experience with academic research. You're comfortable with academic writing, understand norms around authorship and publication, and can produce high-quality research outputs.
- Exceptional communication and relationship skills. This role demands diverse communication at a high level: writing policy briefs and press releases, organizing convenings, live interfacing with policymakers, and technical writing. You can explain complex concepts to non-technical audiences and serve as a public spokesperson to represent Transluce's work to external stakeholders.

Additional pluses:

- Background or prior experience in particular domain(s) related to mental health, child safety, fraud, political persuasion, or consumer protection.
- Experience with government contracting or grant writing.
- Relationships with relevant government offices, civil society organizations,  funders.
- Familiarity with the AI evaluation landscape and its major players.

We hire exceptional people from all backgrounds. If this role excites you, we encourage you to apply—even if you don't meet every qualification listed.

We are located in San Francisco and enthusiastic to work together in-person. We are open to sponsoring international visas.

## 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

- [Business Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-manager-transluce-san-francisco-0wqvya5tm7cv) — San Francisco, CA
- [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
- [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