Place one. Share one. Grow one.
Most organisations building with AI need someone to own its ethics, and cannot find, afford, or justify a full-time hire for it. Sentient Staff places the people who do ethics for AI professionally, exactly where they're needed and not an inch more: outright, fractionally, or on rotation across a cohort.
One role, three ways to fill it.
Not every organisation needs, or can carry, a full-time ethicist. So we match the shape of the person to the shape of the need.
Placement
When you need the role in-house and full-time. We find a vetted AI ethicist, evidence competence independently, and place them. For senior roles, Chief Ethics Officer, Head of AI Governance, this runs like a specialist executive search, same rigour, a narrower brief.
More on placement →Fractional
The sweet spot for most. A seasoned ethicist embedded a few days a month, across your reviews, launches, and escalations, for a fraction of a full-time cost.
More on fractional →Rotation & Pupillage
Rotate one ethicist across a cohort, which builds the independence the role needs, or host a supervised practitioner earning their hours under an accredited mentor.
More on growing one →A curated desk, not a job board.
Sentient Staff runs a two-sided marketplace of organisations and AI ethicists, but a curated one. Every match is introduced by a person who knows both sides, not thrown over a wall by an algorithm. That is what keeps it honest.
The independence charter.
We do not just fill the seat. We make sure it has the authority to matter, and we write that down before you sign anything. Six clauses go into every engagement.
- Independent authority that never sits inside the team it exists to keep honest.
- A named, protected route to raise a values concern, agreed before day one.
- No shortening the engagement because of a values call it did not like.
Composites, not verbatim quotes.
Confidentiality is clause 5 of our own charter, our integrity declaration, so it applies to how we talk about our placements too. These are drawn from patterns across engagements, not attributed to a named organisation or person.
“The first month was hard in the right way: nobody could just nod a launch through any more. A year and a half on, nobody wants to go back to how it worked before.”
“Three days a month sounded thin on paper. In practice it's the difference between catching a problem before a launch and explaining one after.”
“Sharing one ethicist across eight companies could have meant one opinion said eight times. It didn't. Every review still started from our own risk, not a template.”
The role is only as good as its independence.
We do not just fill the seat. We make sure it has the authority to matter. That is the difference between an ethicist and a rubber stamp.
See what that looks like in four real shapes of engagement.