Strategic Events Lead

About Goodfire Goodfire is a research company using interpretability to understand, learn from, and design AI systems. Our mission is to build the next generation of safe and powerful AI—not by scaling alone, but by understanding the intelligence we're building. Scaling has proven powerful, but today's approach is fundamentally limited: we can't meaningfully understand, debug, or shape what models learn. Every engineering discipline has been gated by fundamental science and AI is at that inflection point now. We're advancing the science of how AI systems actually work. Treating models as black boxes is an unnecessary handicap—we have access to the structures inside them, and understanding those structures lets us steer what models learn, make them safer and more useful, and extract the vast knowledge they contain. Our goal is to make AI that can be understood, debugged, and shaped like software. Goodfire is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco with a team of the world’s top interpretability researchers and engineers from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind. We're backed by over $200M from B Capital, Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed, Eric Schmidt, and others. About the role We're looking for an Events Lead to design the moments where Goodfire's work becomes tangible to the most technical people in AI. This role demands taste, operational rigor, and strategic judgment: the ability to create events that feel high-signal, deeply relevant, and worth attending for researchers, engineers, and technical executives. This is a cross-functional role where you will own our events strategy end to end: intimate dinners, research salons, conference programs, field events, partner gatherings, and the systems that turn those moments into lasting relationships. You won't be optimizing a legacy events calendar; you'll be building the event motion for a new category. Our audience is selective and highly technical. You'll need to understand what they care about, partner closely with research, GTM, and field teams, and execute with enough precision that every event advances our market narrative, strengthens relationships, and creates meaningful pipeline. Key responsibilities Own the events strategy and calendar: identify the moments, formats, audiences, and geographies where Goodfire should show up Design high-signal experiences: create events that feel substantive to AI researchers, ML engineers, CTOs, Heads of AI, and other deeply technical buyers Execute with precision: manage vendors, budgets, run-of-show, speaker prep, attendee experience, follow-up, and every operational detail that determines quality Build targeted invite and attendance strategy: partner with GTM, demand gen, and field teams to reach the right accounts and convert attendance into relationship momentum Measure and improve the motion: connect events to pipeline, account engagement, market learning, and repeatable playbooks for future programs What you’ll bring Required experience Experience planning and executing high-quality B2B events, field marketing programs, community programs, or executive gatherings. Strong project management skills and the ability to run many operational details without losing sight of strategy. Excellent taste and audience judgment; you know how to make an event feel substantive, polished, and not generic. Scrappiness, urgency, and comfort building a function from scratch in a fast-moving environment Preferred qualifications Experience creating events for technical audiences, developer communities, AI/ML teams, infrastructure buyers, or research organizations. Background as an early events, field marketing, community, or demand generation hire at a high-growth startup. Experience with conference strategy, speaker programming, executive dinners, private roundtables, or partner events. Ability to translate event outcomes into account insights, pipeline reporting, and next-step GTM actions Our values Goodfire is looking for individual