Product Designer

About CivAI

CivAI is a non-profit that educates policymakers and the public about AI risks using live software demonstrations. To date, CivAI has delivered 100+ briefings to organizations across civil society (on AI-cyber risks, deepfakes, and elder fraud) and the US government (on biological risks, elections, and more). Its work has been featured on national television by ABC News and Scripps News, and in print by the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, CNN, and many others.

About the role

As a Product Designer, you will be deeply embedded in our R&D team researching, designing, and iterating on the software demonstrations and presentations that are at the core of what we do. These will explain both prosaic AI capabilities and more nascent ones that are fast approaching.

This role primarily involves design work, with flexibility across many domains like research, message testing, conducting user interviews, and interfacing with partner organizations. All members of the R&D team stay current on AI news and safety research, and spend significant amounts of time brainstorming and mocking up ideas for presentations.

We'd love to hear from you! If you have any questions about this role, please email us at jobs@civai.org.

In this role, you will:

• Design our AI demonstrations in Figma from end to end, acting as an agentic, creative, and conscientious member of our collaborative team.
• Come up with new presentations that our audiences will find meaningful. See the Representative Projects section for more.
• Iterate quickly on lightweight projects that pack a rhetorical punch, and be prepared to quickly discard what's not working.
• Learn from allies and opponents what design patterns and communication strategies work well or fall flat.
• Stay on top of AI progress in order to educate our audiences and inform new demonstrations. Deep technical knowledge of AI is not needed, but you will maintain a thorough understanding of AI capabilities and risks as they relate to society.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 2+ years of professional experience as a product designer.
• Want to help the world understand AI's implications, so that future AI progress is deliberate and beneficial for humanity.
• Have experience communicating complex ideas to non-technical audiences.

Nice-to-have experience includes designing:

• Interactive explainers.
• Animated interfaces.
• Video games or board games.
• Data journalism.
• Presentation decks.

Representative projects

• A presentation for high level decision makers featuring several demos about loss of control to advanced AI systems, including our recent demo about emergent misalignment.
• A presentation for policymakers showing how frontier AI systems can be used for mass surveillance and bioweapons.
• Our policymaker demos suite, which starts with someone's LinkedIn and makes instant deepfakes of them using a combination of open models, writes personalized phishing emails with Gmail-like UI, creates fake news Tweets and NYT articles, and more.

Salary and benefits

• The role is full-time and on-site at our office in Berkeley. We may be open to remote for exceptional candidates.
• The salary range is $125,000 to $150,000.
• We may be able to offer additional compensation to more senior candidates.
• We provide catered lunch and dinner at our office every weekday.
• We may be able to sponsor visas in select cases.

Application process

• Initial application (15 min) — Resume and portfolio links to assess fit.
• Initial conversation (30 min) — Brief video call with a team member about the role.
• Take-home task (90 min) — Do a teardown of an interactive explainer from a non-AI subject.
• Experience discussion (1 hr) — Talk about your work experience and culture fit with a different team member.
• Final round interview (4 hr) — At our office in Berkeley. We may also offer a paid work trial instead of a final round interview if you prefer.

CivAI is an equal opportunity workplace, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, socioeconomic status, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Health (+ dental, eye, life) insurance, vegan lunch and dinner every day in the office, 401k (no match)

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