[CLOSED] Business Operations Associate

Open Philanthropy is hiring a Business Operations Associate to support and improve the running of our organization, so that we can have greater impact.

 

About Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy is a grantmaker; our mission is to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. We stress openness to many possibilities and have chosen our focus areas based on importance, neglectedness, and tractability. We’re particularly interested in high-risk, high-reward giving that may be too unconventional for other funders. Our current giving areas include global health and development, scientific research, South Asian air quality, farm animal welfare, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.

 

About the Business Operations Team

Open Philanthropy has been growing rapidly, both in our number of staff, and in the volume of grants we make (in 2022, we committed more than $700 million in total funding across more than 800 distinct grants). This would not have been possible without the Business Operations (Biz Ops) team, which makes the organization run as smoothly and effectively as possible at every level. Biz Ops team members are responsible for:

• Making Open Philanthropy more efficient and productive — we both directly support staff with administrative tasks (like booking travel, purchasing and expensing, receiving and forwarding mail) and investigate scalable solutions to commonly-faced problems (e.g. identifying software to automate booking travel, or getting research staff access to paywalled articles faster).
• Coordinating our office needs — we support day-to-day tasks like greeting visitors, ordering supplies, or fixing our workstations, and more strategic work like scoping office move requirements in San Francisco or Washington D.C., or investigating new remote office hubs.
• Providing flex capacity — we provide one-off and ongoing support to our program teams (e.g. cleaning up data or notes from grantee calls, light research or data analysis, organizing files, and team scheduling logistics) and key executives (CEO and Director-level admin support).
• Executing org-wide event logistics — we collaborate with our People Operations team to organize and support quarterly “Togetherness Week” events and an annual retreat to bring our staff together.
• Building and maintaining our IT infrastructure — we have dedicated IT team members, but assistants and associates could be responsible for supporting tech-related onboarding, providing general tech support to our staff, and assisting with the implementation of special IT projects (e.g. an org-wide Helpdesk).

Handling anything else that needs to get done — we are a nimble team and take on unique operations requests as they arise, including ad-hoc tasks and larger projects that facilitate strategic decision-making.

 

Who we’re looking for

This role requires at least two years of relevant operations experience and leadership and/or mentorship experience.

You might be a great fit if you:

• Work in a responsive, agile way; you stay calm when conditions change and can improvise and pivot quickly when priorities shift.
• Enjoy getting stuff done, even if it’s a small or unglamorous task. You are excited to contribute to impact-driven work in a supportive capacity; you know that behind-the-scenes tasks are important, even if they seem indirect or tedious at face value.
• Have a “getting to yes,” solutions-focused approach to handling requests. When someone comes to you with a problem, you want them to come away with a solution, even if that solution looks different from their original ask.
• Have a track record of demonstrating an “operations mindset” — proactively noticing what’s broken, moving fast to fix it, and continually identifying opportunities to do more with the same amount of time and resources.
• Are passionate about Open Phil’s mission and excited to support our work in cause areas such as AI safety, biorisk reduction, or EA community-building. You don’t need to be a subject matter expert in any of these fields, but we are looking for someone comfortable operating within the frameworks we use to think about our work, such as worldview diversification and cause prioritization.

Why this role is important:

• You’ll enable more impactful work to get done — Open Philanthropy has grown a lot over the past year, and you’ll provide operational support to unlock that capacity.
• You’ll help ensure our operations run smoothly across the board — you’ll spot potential problems, and make sure everything keeps moving without major issues.
• You’ll help make Open Philanthropy a great place to work, and a great partner to work with — Biz Ops interacts directly and indirectly with grantees, partners, and current and potential staff. By providing conscientious communication and high-quality support, you’ll promote strong relationships that contribute to the ongoing success of the organization.
• You’ll help make Open Philanthropy the best it can be — we’re always looking for marginal gains that can make Open Philanthropy more effective. You’ll help improve our systems so that everything works better than it does now.

We expect all our staff to: 

• Put our mission first, and act with urgency to help us realize our ambitious goals for impact.
• Work to model our operating values of ownership, openness, calibration and inclusiveness.

Role details & benefits

• Location:
  • We are open to remote candidates who are able to work US business hours. Our current team is split between the East and West coast of the US.
  • Candidates are welcome to work from our San Francisco or Washington, D.C. office. We will assist with relocation costs for candidates moving to those areas.
  • Unfortunately, we aren’t able to sponsor visas for this role, so candidates must have US work authorization if they are intending to work from one of our offices.
• Compensation:
  • The compensation for this role is $112,719.22 which (for US hires) would be distributed as a base salary of $98,016.71 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $14,702.51.
    • This compensation figure assumes a remote location; there would be geographic adjustments upwards for candidates based in the San Francisco Bay Area or Washington, D.C.
  • All compensation will be distributed in the form of take-home salary for internationally based hires.
• Benefits: Our benefits package includes:
  • Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any eligible dependents) and an employer-funded Health Reimbursement Arrangement for certain other personal health expenses.
  • Dental, vision and life insurance for you and your family
  • Four weeks of PTO recommended per year
  • Four months of fully paid family leave
  • A generous and flexible expense policy — we encourage staff to expense the ergonomic equipment, software and other services that they need to stay healthy and productive
• Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer — and preferably by March. 

 

Application timings

We plan to close this round on 7th February, and possibly sooner. Applying sooner rather than later may increase your chance of being hired.

We aim to employ people with many different experiences, perspectives and backgrounds who share our passion for accomplishing as much good as we can. We are committed to creating an environment where all employees have the opportunity to succeed, and we do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected status.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact jobs@openphilanthropy.org.