---
title: 'People Operations Manager at Transluce'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-manager-transluce-san-francisco-rerrmd8ypmpq'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# People 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/am9icG9zdDpvEHZhTv4u8JvZWedJv_Vw

## Job description

Salary range: $150,000 - $200,000/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. We are growing from 20 to 40+ employees in the next 12 months.

About the role: Our team is our most important asset. So hiring well, keeping the people we hire, and building a place worth staying are among the highest-leverage things we do. We are looking for a People Operations Manager to be the first person at Transluce whose whole job is people.

Hiring is the most urgent piece because half the people who will work here a year from now have not been hired yet. Who we hire and how fast we find them determines how quickly we progress our technical ambitions. In tandem, you’ll be responsible for embedding our culture: we want our 40-person team to be not just bigger, but better. So, we need to design good practices and systems now: how to welcome people, how to solicit feedback, and how to get people what they need. If we get things right now, the benefits compound for all future employees.

We have a solid operational foundation (e.g., HRIS, benefits, ATS), 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. Since we are a very 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 People Operations function, directly advising the leadership team on key directional decision-making. We expect to continue expanding the operations team. You would help define these roles and hire for them.

You are ...

- Energized by building a whole domain and ready to be the core person accountable for its excellence
- Opinionated about how hiring, development, culture, and compliance should work—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 the error in a payroll run while still thinking about what we need to build next quarter
- Trusted by colleagues to be a listening ear and to handle sensitive situations well

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

- Hiring: you enable Transluce’s growth by ensuring we can hire the best people- Own our hiring process end-to-end and run it: candidate communications, scheduling, program management, and funnel analysis
- Shape our sourcing strategy (channels, events, partners, outreach) to increase the quality of our top of funnel
- People: You design the employee experience from recruitment to last day- Develop seamless onboarding practices, providing new employees with everything they need in their first week rather than their first month
- Own our benefits, payroll, and HRIS: run them yourself, decide which vendors we use and when we switch, and be the person the team trusts with questions about any of it
- Establish the policies and practices that keep our culture strong as we grow: candid feedback, continuous learning, and clear expectations for what good work looks like.
- Advise managers and employees through sensitive people situations, including performance concerns, conflict, feedback, and other employee-relations issues
- Compliance: You own our federal and multi-state employment compliance. You draw the line between what we handle in-house and what you escalate to outside counsel and our HR providers.- Make the calls that carry real risk: leaves, accommodations, and how we classify employees and contractors
- Meet the deadlines that cannot slip: visa cases with external counsel, business licenses, state registrations, required trainings and postings

## Minimum qualifications

- Has owned hiring rounds end to end alongside hiring managers, with a strong foundational understanding of HR fundamentals
- Has owned core people operations (payroll, benefits, onboarding, visas) and is excited to run them hands-on
- Strong interpersonal skills with demonstrated ability to navigate complexity with honesty, care, and discretion
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills

## Preferred qualifications

- At least 4 years of professional experience including running people operations, ideally at growing startups or nonprofits. Candidates with less overall experience or nontraditional backgrounds are encouraged to apply and may be considered for similar roles
- Experience recruiting highly sought-after technical or research talent; familiarity with the AI research ecosystem is a plus
- Experience scaling a people function as an organization grows
- Already leverages AI and other productivity tools to work effectively or eager to learn. Deep technical skills not required.

This role might not be for you if …

- you want to set direction and hand the details to someone else
- you dislike ambiguity and prefer having an established playbook to work from
- employee relations drains 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

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