The following is a Linkedin post I'm hoping to make to the recently laid-off tech industry in hopes that it makes the AI Safety transition more convincing and palatable.
Please support by commenting or reposting on Friday, May 22 10AM PST | 6PM UTC. Feel free to add me on Linkedin (the 1st hour is most critical). I'll also update with the live link when it posts.
I am receptive to feedback, namely:
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Hey there,
In light of the recent Meta Tech Layoffs, first, I'm sorry that this happened to you. Another one of life's shit that is thrown at us. A time to put on some armor and roll with the punches headed for your head. There are no words.
I'm Jen. Last year, I left my job at Google. Many of you will start applying headfirst into similar roles at other companies, maybe that growing AI startup where your job feels secure in this new economy.
I am here to ask you to consider an additional industry in your search: AI Safety.
With all the excitement around AI and its unprecedented ability to "unlock business value," trillions of capital are being flooded into accelerating AI development across industries, while a measly $50 million dollars and ~1000 people are directly working to ensure AI is safe for humanity. These are orders of magnitude apart, but growing in parallel. The more neglected field of AI Safety needs talent across skillsets like Software, Research, Operations, and Policy.
If you are even remotely concerned about the drastic societal implications of Artificial Intelligence in the next few years, maybe its ability to adversely affect human labor & cognition or its vast structural impacts on the world your children will live in, please keep reading on how you can upskill & add the growing AI Safety field to your job search.
How you can add the AI Safety field to your job search
1) Spend time getting oriented and upskilling
Some good introductions include:
- 80,000 Hours AI risk problem profile
- Youtube Explainers (AI: What Happens Next? or AI in Context)
- Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI by Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic
For more in-depth learning & support, consider a free, facilitated course through BlueDot Impact (a few hours a week, no technical background needed). They offer a variety of courses.
- Completing a BlueDot course will unlock some insider resources: an 8k member international community, stipends for Career Transitions, and an Incubator Week.
The goal here is not to become an expert. The goal is to get fluent enough to have a real conversation with someone in the field.
2) Figure out what your role could be (Guide)
If you're technical, some options might be: Research Engineer, Safety Engineer, Founder, etc. Technical guide here.
If you're business-oriented, some options might be: Director of Operations at a safety lab, Chief of Staff to a research team, Program Manager at a funding organization, Research Manager, and more. General guide here.
If you have spent the last five to ten years executing in Tech, you are qualified for a lot of what the field needs.
Some job boards include: 80,000 hours, and AISafety.com. If you want to broaden for Social Impact, I recommend ProbablyGood and PCDN.global
You can also apply for coaching at Successif, AISafety.Quest, and SteadRise. I'll elaborate at the end, but my DMs and Calendar are also open.
3) Apply in parallel, not instead
Continue your regular job search. Treat AI safety as a few additional applications running alongside everything else.
The marginal cost of adding these to your search is low. The upside is a job that is both well-compensated and aimed at something that is mission critical.
4) If you get traction, there are endless ways to go deeper.
If you land interviews or get real signal that you are a good fit, then it is worth thinking about:
- career transition grants that provide runway,
- applying to fellowships,
- attending a conference,
- getting involved with the communities at large.
Most people who have made this transition did not have a master plan. They sent some applications, had some conversations, and found a door that was more open than they expected, which leads me to:
Case Studies of Real People who pivoted from Tech to AI Safety
| Removed full names to preserve some privacy, but the post will contain and tag them. |
- Jack W. | SWE at Amazon → BlueDot Incubator → Member of Technical Staff at Andon Labs
- Caleb B. | SWE at Google → Research Fellow alongside Redwood Research
- Scott W. | Principal PM at Amazon → Seldon Lab Accelerator → Founder in AI Security, Luthien Research
- Me, Jen B. | Product Ops at Google → AI Safety Community Builder → TBD
This will not be an easy journey, likely on par with your existing job search, but potentially a highly impactful one in tackling humanity's next greatest challenge.
My DMs and Calendar are open. I can offer some personalized resources in this vast field, how to get plugged into the community, and coach you through your tactical next steps.
I don’t take payments & am not selling a service. I am doing this on my own accord and am funded by Coefficient Giving as a Community Organizer for Effective Altruism San Francisco.
Thank you to Feifan Liu and @gergo for your initial feedback.
Thoughts on the option of starting AI safety work as a volunteer? There's some good evals that have been made by independent researchers in their own time, and I think 80,000 hours has suggested something like this as a first step to get a job.
In my personal experience a layoff often comes with burnout that can take a while to recover from, and impact may be a welcome excuse to take a break from the zero-sum rat race of job apps and to read some papers and play around with LLMs.
I think getting a job at an AI safety org historically has required exceptional talent or exceptional passion and peristence, though not necessarily both. In a recent hiring round at my org, we had a flood qualified candidates and had to turn down good people with both. I think that a lot of these people could be (and in some cases already are) doing great work even if they're not getting paid for it.
If/when future funding comes more volunteers means a community ready to absorb it and grow (and regardless it means more important work gets done)!
"trillions of capital are being flooded into accelerating AI development across industries" fwiw this seems only correct under a very expansive definition of accelerating AI development, e.g. all hyperscaler capex (including non-AI spend and AI inference) was ~$500 billion in 2025
"while a measly $50 million dollars" this seems outdated -- Coefficient Giving’s Technical AI Safety team made 140 million USD in grants in 2025. If you consider all other funding (the UK AISI's founding budget was ~$125M, internal lab speding on technical AI safety, other grantmakers, etc.), it's plausible we're over $1 billion.
thank you! nudge nudge- 80k nudge nudge