Operations Assistants

Table of Contents

    Open Philanthropy is looking to hire at least two Operations Assistants to support the day-to-day work of our Business Operations and Legal teams.

     

    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’s Business Operations team (BizOps) responds flexibly to program and research staff needs, and does everything else necessary to ensure that Open Philanthropy runs smoothly. As a Business Operations Assistant you would:

    • Make Open Philanthropy more efficient and productive — you’ll both directly support staff with time-consuming tasks (like cleaning up data or notes from grantee calls) 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).
    • Support our office needs, in San Francisco — we’re planning to downsize our San Francisco office space to reflect our distributed workforce. You’ll support our relocation within the Bay and help both maintain that office and set up new remote office hubs in other cities.
    • Run gatherings and events — you’ll provide flex capacity support for quarterly “togetherness week” events and an annual retreat to bring our staff together, as well as taking on team-specific event planning needs (e.g. bringing grantees together for a summit).
    • Handle anything else that needs to get done — it’s impossible to anticipate everything we might need, so you’ll often take on special projects and ad hoc tasks as they arise.

     

    About the Legal Team

    Open Philanthropy’s Legal team provides well-calibrated legal advice and engages in collaborative and creative problem-solving. As a Legal Assistant you would:

    • Provide administrative support – you’ll update our grant agreement and contract template, maintain our document filing systems, manage and improve our workflow, task tracking, and knowledge management systems, coordinate scheduling, take notes, and generally make sure things are running smoothly.
    • Do legal research and writing – you’ll do first pass legal research and write up your findings on issues that come up for the legal team. Or an attorney working on a larger project may assign you a subset of their research. This will include things involving grants and grantmaking (like: when can we make a retroactive grant?), but also any other thing that comes up in the course of Open Phil’s day-to-day operations.
    • Facilitate cross-team projects and functions – legal work often intersects with work that other teams own, including financial compliance and grant compliance; the legal assistant will work with other teams to ensure frictionless handoff. This can include owning parts of these processes, such as reviewing grantee reports on their work and helping run contractor onboarding and renewal.
    • Assist with legal team needs – this might include making travel arrangements, doing expense reports, reviewing bills from outside firms and other things that will free up attorney time.

     

    Who we’re looking for

    There are no formal degree or work experience requirements for either role, and we’re open to considering both applicants brand new to operations work, as well as more experienced candidates. You might be a great fit for this work if you:

    • Work in a responsive, agile way; you stay calm when conditions change and are able to improvise and pivot quickly when priorities shift.
    • 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.
    • 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 track record of demonstrating (or are excited to develop) 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 who is comfortable operating within the frameworks we use to think about our work, such as worldview diversification and cause prioritization.
    • For Legal Assistant candidates some familiarity with legal work is preferred, but not required

    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

    • Compensation: 
      • Business Operations Assistant:
        • The compensation for this role will be $96,974.64. This would be distributed as a base salary of $84,325.77 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $12,648.87.
      • Legal Assistant:
        • The compensation for this role will be $90,615.30. This would be distributed as a base salary of $78,795.91 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $11,819.39.
        • The compensation figures for the Legal Assistant role assume a remote location; there would be geographic adjustments upwards for candidates based in the San Francisco Bay Area or Washington, D.C.
    • Location:
      • Business Operations Assistant:
        • This role involves working onsite full-time at our headquarters in San Francisco. We thus require hires to be based in the Bay Area, and will assist with relocation costs for candidates based elsewhere.
        • Unfortunately, we aren’t able to sponsor visas for this role, so candidates must have US work authorization.
      • Legal Assistant:
        • You can work from anywhere. While we aren’t able to sponsor visas for this role, we are open to hires outside the US willing to consistently overlap with US business hours. Our current team is split between the West and East coast of the United States.
    • Benefits: Our benefits package includes
      • Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any dependents)
      • 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
      • We can’t always provide every benefit we offer US staff to international hires, but we’re working on it (and will usually provide cash equivalents of any benefits we can’t offer in your country)
    • Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer — and definitely no later than December, though ideally much sooner.

    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 [email protected].