Good Senior People Exist and We’re Wasting Them

What I've learned from 70+ conversations with mid-senior ops career transitioners

My current Generator Project on Routing Mid-Senior (Ops) Talent to High Impact Roles in AIS took shape properly ~3 weeks ago and I want to sketch out some initial findings and hypotheses that I can continue to work on as I proceed. The Theory of Change was to help AIS orgs scale and generally have more capacity/ function better to have more of an impact and generally mature the field by filling senior ops roles which have historically had a hard time getting filled. The specific mechanism was initially to talk to a bunch of promising senior ops people who are AI Safety curious and match…

saved by

• Kenneth Sun
• Jeremy Kintana

related reading

• AI safety is maturing. Is its generalist talent pipeline keeping up? — EA Forumforum.effectivealtruism.org
• What happens after we bring people into AI safety?clarityiscourage.substack.com
• The case for AI safety capacity-building workmultipliercg.substack.com
• How do we close the Junior <> Senior talent gap™? · Ady Mehtaadymehta.xyz
• [UPDATE] From Comfort Zone to Frontiers of Impact: Pursuing A Late-Career Shift to Existential Risk Reduction — EA Forumforum.effectivealtruism.org
• Recruitment is extremely important and impactfulgoodstructures.co
• Thoughts on the job market in the age of LLMsinterconnects.ai
• AI Safety Talent Needs in 2026: Insights for Field-Building Organizationsmatsresearch.substack.com
• AI Safety's Biggest Talent Gap Isn't Researchers. It's Generalists. — EA Forumforum.effectivealtruism.org
• The Old World Is Dying - by Jasmine Sunjasmi.news
• Who will be the senior engineers of 2035? - The Engineering Managertheengineeringmanager.com
• Stuff you should have been taught in college but weren’t &#8211; Casey Handmer&#039;s blogcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com