Transformation Senior Manager
Lead LISA’s Transformation Projects and drive our capability work to support our member organisations.
The London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA) is the UK's central hub for AI safety. Our mission is to build the ecosystem the world needs to navigate transformative AI safely, by strengthening the capacity, capability, and cooperation of the AI safety field.
Our London hub hosts some of the brightest individuals and organisations in the field: researchers, founders, government officials, and AI safety staff from organisations like Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and the UK AI Safety Institute. By co-locating these people in the same building, we lower the friction to collaboration, accelerate the careers of those entering the field, and strengthen the organisations working to make AI go well.
Alongside the hub, our field building work addresses three problems the AI safety field faces:
Capacity: Mobilising talent into the field
Capability: Strengthening the organisations working on AI safety
Cooperation: Convening the ecosystem so it adds up to more than the sum of its parts
LISA is growing quickly, and so are the organisations we host. We are recruiting a Transformation Senior Manager to drive our Capability work to support organisations and to lead LISA’s transformation projects. Reporting directly to the Director of Transformation, you'll own both end to end.
You’ll work across two areas:
Organisation support: assessing capability across the organisations at LISA, building ongoing support and advisory relationships, manage specific project scoping and delivery, and manage senior stakeholders
Transformation at LISA: developing strategies and owning projects end to end to support LISA’s scaling journey
You'll be a good fit if you have come through top-tier management consulting, or an equivalent in-house strategy function. You will be able to structure ambiguous problems, reach defensible answers under time pressure, and bring senior stakeholders along the journey. You will be comfortable advising high impact organisations across a range of sizes (from early stage start-ups to mid size teams) and enjoy working on a mixed portfolio of projects. You will care deeply about seeing through to execution and monitoring impact.
This role has significant range. One week you might be running a capability assessment with the leadership of a resident organisation, building the financial model behind a funding application, or writing a Board paper on where LISA grows next. Another week you might be building a playbook on best practices for organisations in the field, or scoping a transformation project inside LISA.
Few roles give you a portfolio of organisations to strengthen and this much proximity to the decisions that shape a fast-growing one.
About LISA and the Role
Drive organisation support
Assess capability across the organisations at LISA. Master the details of a wide range of organisations, deeply understanding their strategy, scaling plans, and operating models.
Turn assessment into support. With each organisation, work out what they need to help them scale, and determine how LISA can support and where specialist experts should be engaged.
Run ongoing advisory relationships. Hold a standing relationship with the leaders of the organisations we host, so that you are the person they call when they need support. Be the go to expert for specific strategy and operations problem areas.
Deliver time-bound projects end to end. Scope a discrete piece of work with an organisation, whether a hiring plan, a governance review, a financial model or an operating rhythm, agree what done looks like, and deliver it to that standard. Own the full end to end process, including monitoring impact.
Build the offering so it scales. Develop the diagnostics, templates, playbooks and service standards behind organisation support
Partner with the LISA Operations team, contractors, and external experts where specialist depth is needed. Manage necessary teams to deliver with excellence.
Challenge assumptions constructively, including those held by senior leaders, so that decisions are taken with a realistic view of risks, trade-offs and second-order effects.
Measure whether organisations get stronger. Focus on building durable capabilities.
Drive transformation at LISA
Develop strategy. Take LISA's open strategic questions, such as which organisations we host, how we grow, and what we stop doing, and produce an answer with the analysis behind it.
Own projects end to end, from first framing through to an embedded outcome. Define the problem, challenge assumptions constructively, frame the decision with clear options and a recommendation, and follow through once a call is made.
Apply delivery discipline to project management: planning, milestone tracking, risk and issue management etc.
What you’ll do
You like taking something ambiguous, structuring it and creating followership through to execution, and you enjoy the people as much as the process. More specifically:
You have a top-tier consulting background. 5+ years at a leading strategy or management consulting firm, or an equivalent in-house strategy function. You can structure an ambiguous problem, reach a defensible answer under time pressure, and present it to people who will push back on it.
You build credibility with founders and executives. You can sit down with the chief executive of a mid-size organisation or a founder of an early stage start-up and quickly understand their organisations and add value. You excel in managing stakeholders and conversing across technical and non-technical areas.
You own through to outcome. You have stayed with a piece of work past the recommendation, through implementation, and been accountable for whether it landed.
You have organisational range. You have worked across a range of problem areas spanning strategy, finance, governance, hiring and operating model design.
You have high agency and sound judgement. You take whole problems and drive them to completion, including the ones that fall between other people's remits. You know when to be hands on and when to let others lead. You know where rigour is non-negotiable and where a lighter approach will do. Small organisations break under process built for large ones.
You communicate with clarity. Board papers, funder-facing analysis, and short internal documents that make a decision easy to take.
AI is part of how you work. You already use AI tools to change what you can produce. Your use of them is judicious, and you know when your own and others’ thinking is needed.