Iliad Education Roles: Creating the World’s Best Alignment Research Courses
TL;DR: We’re quickly scaling the Iliad Intensive, which has seen 10x applicant growth per iteration since April, and are hiring for many roles in the Education team to keep up with that growth. The post gives a snapshot of the Intensive, the roles that enable our future plans, and my opinion of what it’s like to work at Iliad.
At Iliad, we do fieldbuilding for predominantly theoretical AI alignment research across the entire spectrum. We start at the foundations with the Iliad Intensive, a four-week full-time and in-person course on largely theoretical approaches to AI alignment research, followed by the Fellowship, Fellowship extensions, and new incubated research bets, among other activities. We are now quickly scaling the Intensive (and the Fellowship too!), with three more iterations just this year and, if funding and applicant interest allows, double cohorts in London and the Bay Area each month in 2027. As the Director of Education, I’m hiring for many roles to make that growth possible!
Where the Intensive is at
The Intensive started in April in London, with a cohort of just ~16 people, and materials later released in the form of a Google Doc, covering modules in the clusters of alignment, learning, interpretability, agency, and safety guarantees. It benefited tremendously from the network that Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel, our executive director, built over the years: The curriculum was created by around 15 different people, all focusing on their expertise, which led to content that is both broad and fairly deep on many topics. We’ve since then run another iteration in June (~15 participants), and now in August in Berkeley (~37 participants). Monthly iterations for September, October, and November are lined up. We are integrating our 3-month fellows directly into teaching to help with capacity constraints that come with this growth.
The Intensive clearly fills an important gap in the landscape, with participants in the first iteration calling it in their testimonials “life changing”, “new and ambitious”, and “a one-of-a-kind course”, among other praise. The demand for the course has risen dramatically, with a 10-fold increase in applicants per cohort between April and September, which means we can scale up the cohort size while simultaneously increasing the admissions bar. The praise and interest are probably predominantly driven by our novelty, uniqueness, and outreach efforts. The course itself is already good, but has many avenues for improvement. We’re in the process of improving the materials and are starting to host them on a website under construction.
Where the Intensive is going, and open roles
I think if we work hard, the Intensive and follow-up programs could establish themselves widely as the best AI alignment research courses available. To achieve this, we need to work in parallel on many fronts:
- The teaching needs to improve and be expanded. To this end, we are searching for teachers and teaching assistants on a contractual basis. More teaching capacity will allow us to provide the modules in a more pedagogical ordering, whereas so far we’ve often been reliant on the schedules of our limited staff. We’re also searching for a Teaching Lead to cover many modules and to coach our contracting teachers.
- The curriculum needs to improve: Some of our modules are more preliminary than others and need more work to become fully fleshed out. We are also interested in entirely new modules to improve breadth and to give us more options for scheduling modules in each iteration. Writers cover this need. You may also be interested in becoming our Curriculum Development Lead to set the overall vision and direction for the course and to interface with the writers to make sure their modules combine coherently.
- We need to make the online materials high-quality and maximally self-contained. This will have several benefits: Students can self-study the materials online, we’re more resilient to bad teaching (since in-person participants can always fall back to the materials if the explanations by a particular teacher are insufficient), and teachers can more easily be onboarded since they can quickly study the materials themselves. To this effect we’re searching for an Education Platform Lead. As an inspiration, I think our platform and materials should (and can!) eventually reach the quality of ARENA’s materials.
- With the scale-up of our in-person cohorts (of both Intensive and Fellowship) to a larger size, there is a growing demand to ensure the overall health and well-being of our participants. To this end, we want to trial a Community & Health Manager to organize social events, to help participants who are struggling, and to build scalable community practices.
- The Intensive can be further expanded along several dimensions. An Intensive Advanced may go deeper on a smaller number of modules, many IntensiveX versions could be locally hosted by independent organizations and universities, an Intensive Online could scale the course to vastly more people at a fraction of the marginal cost, and in an Intensive Seminar, leading experts could teach a larger number of interested students in a more informal manner. The Iliad Intensive Extensions Lead will be responsible for such expansions and own their vision and delivery.
- Iliad as a whole is experimenting with various outreach strategies to find theoretical talent to join our programs. We will trial the role of a Video Lead to produce technically compelling and broadly accessible videos about Iliad research and teaching. Take a look at our YouTube Channel to find videos produced by an earlier contractor.
- This will be a big team. To support the overall operations, I want to trial an Executive Assistant & Operations Generalist.
Apply here for one or several of the roles.
What working at Iliad is like
Working at Iliad is not for everyone. Here’s a brief summary of unique features that may or may not appeal to you:
- Iliad has a sense of urgency. AI companies are planning to build a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” within a small number of years, so there is no time to waste.
- Iliad is growing very quickly. It was started in May 2025 and already has on the order of 15-20 full-time staff across operations and research.
- We default to action: Whenever there is no clear reason that something can’t be done, we quickly commit to it, often before there is a clear plan of how it could be achieved.
- Iliad is a chaotic place. Priorities, role descriptions, and reporting lines tend to be in rapid flux.
- We’re building the ship as we sail it, both for projects and for Iliad as a whole. For example, almost no module of the first iteration of the Intensive had been written more than 2 days in advance of its teaching; the deliverables we asked from fellows in our summer Fellowship only crystallized later in the program; and Iliad’s operations and management practices are in a constant struggle to be built before they’re outgrown by new staff influx.
Working here requires having or learning a tolerance for change and uncertainty. Yet in my opinion it is rewarded by a sense of possibility that I’ve not felt elsewhere. Ask me any questions in the comments or directly apply here.
- A short bullet-point summary of the roles:Full-time:Trial and Contracting:
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