Director, Public AI Training Data Infrastructure Fund

The mission of Renaissance Philanthropy is to fuel a 21st century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists, and innovators. Our aim is to activate a virtuous loop of increasing ambition and impact between philanthropists and innovators: by identifying frontier experts both in science and in new ways of solving problems; by tapping into the growing number of emerging philanthropists; and by building multi-sector initiatives that can harness the power of philanthropy, markets, and governments. We advance our mission by advising philanthropists, surfacing breakthrough ideas, and incubating ambitious initiatives.

Every major large language model in production today depends on open, publicly available training data — web corpora, curated datasets, multilingual text collections, and other digital assets that make up the hidden underlayer of data infrastructure enabling modern AI. These resources are foundational to the AI stack, but investment in their maintenance and improvement has not kept pace with the growth of the industry built on top of them. Renaissance Philanthropy is launching a new fund to address this. The initial focus will be on strengthening public AI training data infrastructure — reducing the cost and complexity of accessing large-scale web data, expanding multilingual and culturally representative corpora, and ensuring that researchers, startups, and public institutions are not locked out of the AI frontier by data access barriers alone.

This is an unique opportunity to stand up a new fund at the intersection of AI, open science, and digital infrastructure. As Director, you will design and lead this fund from inception — convening experts for field strategy, building the grantmaking apparatus, managing a portfolio of funded teams, and stewarding a growing coalition of philanthropic, government, and technical partners. You will work alongside a technical Principal Investigator and an advisory board to realize this vision — to shape the next generation of public data infrastructure for democratized AI.

Roles & Responsibilities include serving as the public face of the fund, setting strategic direction, representing the fund to partners, managing the full grant lifecycle, coordinating with technology partners, and building a public working group. The role also requires connecting the fund's work to federal open-data and open-science policy priorities.